Dust Distribution and Emission Modeling (Study Area: Mahshahr Area)

Abstract

Dust storms are one of the most significant challenges in the Western Asia region in recent years and have intensified because of drought. Emission of dust in a scattered and especially heterogeneous manner has made it difficult to determine the exact effect, so modeling is one of the best possible ways to quantify dust emission. Moreover, to deal with this phenomenon, it is necessary to identify the main and influential factors and, by combining these factors, we can predict dust storms using models. The purpose of this study is to model the distribution and emission of dust in two stormy days on the 26th and 27th of January 2017 in the arid and the hyper-arid region of Mahshahr. For this purpose, coding of each meteorological parameter (section 2.2), dust input concentration parameters, and in MATLAB R2014 software have been made. Also, dust input concentration maps were prepared for the two stormy days in the study area in ARCGIS 9.3 software. Finally, the results were evaluated with WRF model outputs. The efficiency of the developed model was also evaluated based on the hourly data of the dust input concentration for two stormy days in the study area. The evaluation of the model shows the ability of this model to modeling the dust distribution in the study area with high intensity of dust emitted and high accuracy. The R correlation index for the period under study was 0.84, which indicates the high accuracy of the model.