BACKGROUND One of the natural phenomena which have had considerable impacts on various regions of the world, including Iran, is "dust storm". In recent years, this phenomenon has taken on new dimensions in Iran and has changed from a local problem to a national issue. This study is an attempt to investigate the formation of the dust storms crossing the Western Iran. METHODOLOGY To find the so...

[1] Recent laboratory tests, analog studies and numerical simulations all suggest that Martian dust devils and larger dusty convective storms generate and maintain large-scale electric fields. Such expected E-fields will have the capability to create significant electron drift motion in the collisional gas and to form an extended high energy (u kT) electron tail in the distribution. We demonstr...

For the past five years, rare Leonid meteor storms offered unique access to cometary dust by spectacular manifestations of recently ejected dust grains, which could be observed by exceptional meteor observing techniques. The final storms, those of November 19, 2002, measured the dust distribution in a comet dust trail far from the position of the comet itself. The measured spatial and particle ...

At the end of the 19th century, Irish astronomers Johnstone Stoney and A.M.W. Downing showed in principle how to predict meteor storms. Their work and later developments applying similar ideas are reviewed here. The theories essentially involve determining the dynamical behavior of dust trails, which are narrow, dense structures within a broader stream. The formation of dust trails and the main...

The vast expanse of the Gobi desert across the Mongolian plateau features frequent dust storms. In this isolated region remote sensing techniques can provide an effective measurement of dust storms. Brightness temperature channels 4, 5 of AVHRR/NOAA satellite data, emissive bands of MODIS/TERRA satellite data, and meteorological station measurement data were used and tested for dust and sandsto...

there are many reports of serious problems of dust storm events in the western parts of iran. based on many researches, iraq is one of the main sources of dust storms in western parts of iran. the radial basis function network (rbfn) model has been used to assess wind erosion hazard in iraq as a main source area of dust storms over several western cities of iran. the percentage of vegetation is...

In this study, data provided by the geostationary satellite GMS-5 S-VISSR was used to monitor dust storms. Although other satellites, such as TOMS, provide information regarding dust cover and air quality over specific locations, their limited orbital observation time makes it hard to issue real-time warnings for dust storms. Since geostationary satellites are capable of providing hourly observ...

Air pollution has been shown to increase frequency of asthma attacks, as usually measured by hospitalisation rates. We hypothesise that purchase of asthma reliever medications will reflect a broader association between the environmental exposure and asthma exacerbations. In a time series analysis, we estimated the association of dust storms with mild asthma manifestations, as indicated by medic...