Fine and Coarse Dust Effects on Radiative Forcing, Mass Deposition, and Solar Devices Over the Middle East

Abstract

In desert regions like the Middle East, dust has a profound impact on the environment, climate, air quality, and solar devices. The size of dust particles determines the extent of these effects. Dust deposition (DD) measurements show that coarse dust particles with geometric radius r > 10 μm comprise most of the deposited mass. Still, these particles are not represented in the current models that are tuned to fit the observed aerosol optical depth (AOD). As a result, the existing models and reanalysis products underestimate DD and dust emission (DE) almost 3 times. This is the first study to constrain the dust simulations by both AOD and DD measurements to quantify the effect of coarse and fine dust using the WRF‐Chem model. We found that, on average, coarse dust contributes less than 10% to dust shortwave radiative forcing (RF) at the surface but comprises more than 70% of DE. Annual mean net RF over the Arabian Peninsula and regional seas locally reaches −25 W m−2. Airborne fine dust particles with radii r < 3 μm are mainly responsible for the significant dimming (5%–10%) of solar radiation, cooling the surface, and hampering solar energy production. However, dust mass deposition is primarily linked to coarse particles, decreasing the efficiency of photovoltaic panels by 2%–5% per day. Therefore, incorporating coarse dust in model simulations and data assimilation would improve the overall description of the dust mass balance and its impact on environmental systems and solar devices.

Investigation of Dust‐Induced Direct Radiative Forcing Over the Arabian Peninsula Based on High‐Resolution WRF‐Chem Simulations

“…On the other hand, the negative values lead to a gain of surface energy. Our results based on WRF-Chem simulations are consistent with similar conclusions from case studies for the Middle East regions (e.g., Chaibou et al, 2020;Miller et al, 2019;Mostamandi et al, 2023;Saleeby et al, 2019).…”

“…On diurnal scales as well, the dust loading is higher during the daytime over the AP (Middleton, 1986;Saleeby et al, 2019), due to an increase in turbulence, strong local winds, and anomalous heating. Mostamandi et al (2023) investigated the annual dust radiative forcing for various dust bins over the Middle East. Their simulations suggest that, overall, dust particles contribute to an area-averaged annual mean radiative cooling of 5.72 Wm 2 , with the maximum cooling of 20 Wm 2 simulated over the southern Red Sea.…”