The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) is the National Supercomputer Facility in Spain, hosting MareNostrum, one of the most powerful Supercomputers in Europe. The Earth Sciences Department of BSC operates daily regional dust and air quality forecasts and conducts intensive modelling research for short-term operational prediction. This contribution summarizes the latest developments and curr...

[1] Aerosols absorb solar radiation thus changing the atmospheric temperature profile but the overall magnitude of this effect is not known. To that end, Saharan dust emissions over the Atlantic Ocean provide an opportunity to examine aerosol-related heating via satellite imaging. A major difficulty, however, is disentangling a straightforward heating signal caused by the absorbing dust from a ...

The variation of aerosols, especially dust aerosol, in time and space plays an important role in climate forcing studies. Aerosols can effectively reduce land surface longwave emission and re-emit energy at a colder temperature, making estimation of downwelling surface longwave radiation (DSLR) with satellite data difficult. Using the latest atmospheric radiative transfer code (MODTRAN 5.0), we...

Dust devils are low-pressure, small (many to tens of meters) convective vortices powered by surface heating and rendered visible by lofted dust. Dust devils occur ubiquitously on Mars, where they may dominate the supply of atmospheric dust, and since dust contributes significantly to Mars’ atmospheric heat budget, dust devils probably play an important role in its climate. The dust-lifting capa...

Coal mining and related industry can increase heavy metals (HMs) concentrations in soil, atmosphere and wheat, thereby posing metal-associated human health risk via food ingestion.  In this study, 58 samples of soil, wheat, and dust were collected from Xuzhou coal mine eastern China, six kinds of HMs Pb, Cd, Cu, Zn, As and Cr were studied for their spatial distribution in wheat, enrichment in d...

Global atmospheric dust is simulated using DEAD (Dust Entrainment and Deposition model) in combination with the global scale Oslo CTM2 using meteorological data for 1996. Dust sources are calculated both using mean wind speeds with model resolution (T63) and sub-grid wind speeds. Different datasets are used to describe soil erodibility. We explain how the different assumptions on dust productio...

Isotopic characterization of aerosol mineral particles (atmospheric dust) of varying sizes is essential in classifying source areas, and for determining the source of dust deposited over oceans and icesheets. However, the effect of atmospheric transport on radiogenic isotopic compositions is not well constrained, making provenance interpretation difficult. In order to investigate the isotopic v...

Asian dust events result from displacement of atmospheric pollutants from the Chinese and Mongolian deserts, causing associated health issues throughout Northeast Asia. We investigated the relationship between skin symptoms in Asian dust events and contact allergy to Asian dust and associated metals. Increases in atmospheric levels of heavy metals such as Ni, Al, and Fe occurred during the seve...