Sensitivity study of daily dust forecast over MENA region using RegCM4 model

Dust storms are one of the most frequent weather phenomena in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Therefore, the daily forecast of dust events is a vital tool for the different sectors. There are many regional models used to forecast atmospheric dust storms. Here, the ICTP regional climate model (RegCM4) was used to simulate atmospheric dust emission, transportation, and deposition, with the optical properties of the dust particles, over the MENA region. In this paper, forecasted Dust Optical Depth (DOD) by RegCM4 has been compared with the Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) measured by AERONET over different stations and by MODIS. The first run used two datasets (NCEP/GFS and ERA-Interim) for the meteorological initial and boundary conditions, whereas the second experiment used GFS with two dust emission schemes. The last run used GFS with two different values for the erodibility factor (1 and 0.5). The RegCM4 forecast with GFS and Scheme1 resulted in higher values of DOD than that measured by AERONET. However, when using the ERA-Interim or Scheme2, they did not make a significant difference, but the erodibility factor decreasing has led to reducing the overestimation values.