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The duration of dust days (DDD) is one of the most important parameters that may worsen the effects of the presence of dust in the affected areas. Persistent pollution over consecutive dusty days can have particularly negative effects on the human respiratory system. The present analysis was conducted in Central Iran, where the phenomenon of dust is one of the most important problems. In this study, using dust codes recorded at 35 synoptic stations, the homogeneity of DDD across the region was investigated using the L-moments method. Then, characteristics of DDD over the period 1999–2018 were calculated. The results showed that the region is statistically homogeneous. Furthermore, Zabol and Zahdan are the stations worst affected, with the longest durations of 22 and 21 days in 2014. Additionally, the values of DDD with return periods of 5, 10, 25, and 50 years were calculated using fitted statistical distributions and kriging and mapped. Finally, using the K nearest neighbor method the most important factor affecting DDD of the spatial characteristics, including longitude, latitude, elevation, average daily temperature (tm), dew point (td), wind altitude (u), maximum wind speed (ffmax), and direction of the fastest wind (ddmax), was determined. It was found that the southeastern parts of the study area are affected by the longest dust storm duration in all return periods; over longer return periods, long dust storms are also found in the central parts, especially the central desert of Iran. Therefore, these areas should be given priority in fighting and controlling wind erosion. Furthermore, the results showed that the maximum wind speed has the greatest effect on DDD.

This article addresses linear precoder design for the peak‐to‐average power ratio (PAPR) reduction of the generalized frequency division multiplexing (GFDM) scheme. This design relies on minimizing various statistical parameters of the instantaneous power of the GFDM signal—including variance, second and third moments—using gradient‐based optimization methods. In this regard, a general framework of four different scenarios, which employs the steepest descent and conjugate‐gradient methods and utilizes two different approaches of fixed and dynamic step‐sizing, is proposed. In the case of fixed step‐sizing, the results demonstrate that the algorithm diverges in some scenarios and provides low‐speed convergence for the others due to its inability in meeting the terminating threshold regarding minimizing objective function to a desirable level. However, dynamic step‐sizing using the Wolf line search rule circumvents these drawbacks, outperforms the existing research, and converges in all scenarios to a precoder providing advantages in terms of design speed and achievable PAPR, while keeping the symbol error rate and out‐of‐band emissions at the ranges of the un‐precoded GFDM systems. Moreover, the results confirm the comprehensiveness of the proposed framework in adapting to various GFDM statistical parameters and gradient methods.

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