Seasonal transport patterns of intense Saharan dust events at the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa

Ambient Particulate Matter Concentration Levels and their Origin During Dust Event Episodes in the Eastern Mediterranean

“…This observation is in agreement with other studies (Pey et al 2013). In this study the shortest Sahara dust event lasted 2 h (30/06/2008) whereas the longest about 78 h (26-29/02/2004), durations that are in agreement with other Saharan dust observations in central Mediterranean (Meloni et al 2008).…”

“…The African storms in the eastern Mediterranean from spring to early summer, which lead to the transport of heavily loaded air masses, are associated with the west-east motion of Sharav cyclones (Meloni et al 2008). …”

Assessment and validation in time domain of a Robust Satellite Technique (RSTASH) for ash cloud detection

“…On the other hand, as can be seen also from figure 2, most of the misdetections (*80%) occurred between April and October 2007, suggesting a seasonal pattern of the causal events. This result seems to further corroborate the hypothesis that dust produced residual misdetections as well, since it is in agreement with a previous study (Meloni et al 2008) that showed that Saharan dust episodes, affecting the Mediterranean region, occur with the highest frequency in July, and then during May, April and October. Therefore, an improved ash/dust discrimination strategy should be investigated, tested and implemented, in order to better discriminate these different features, even considering that a similar RST configuration was useful to detect a recent dust event occurring in Australia .…”

Synoptic conditions favouring the occurrence of aerosol episodes over the broader Mediterranean basin

“…These conditions favour the transport of dust from the Sahara, resulting thus in aerosol episodes primarily in the central and secondarily in the western Mediterranean (frequencies up to 31%, Figure 9(c)). A similar circulation pattern at 700 hPa has been reported by Meloni et al (2008) (1-2) in the eastern Mediterranean basin are due to rare (frequencies below 5%) transport of mineral particles from the Arabian Peninsula, and maybe to anthropogenically produced aerosols from the Egyptian megacity of Cairo and Alexandria (Kanakidou et al, 2011), or from rice-straw taking place in autumn along the Nile River . The days with aerosol episodes of this Cluster belong to the warm period of the year with maximum frequency in May (Figure 9(e)).…”

“…These episodes are: (i) desert dust (e.g. Dayan et al, 1991;Moulin et al, 1997a;Tsidulko et al, 2002;Kubilay et al, 2003;Papayannis et al, 2005;Kalivitis et al, 2007;Toledano et al, 2007;Meloni et al, 2008), (ii) fine pollution aerosols (Kukkonen et al, 2005;Ladstätter-Weißenmayer et al, 2007;Sciare et al, 2008), (iii) forest fires Niemi et al, 2005;Pace et al, 2005), and (iv) sea-salt aerosols (Marenco et al, 2007). Nevertheless, most of these studies either focus on episodes of specific aerosol types or they refer to the local scale only.…”