The atmospheric movement of arid soil can play an important role in the movement of microorganisms attached to soil microparticles. Bacterial community structures in Asian dust collected at Beijing were investigated using the 16S rRNA gene sequence and compared to those in arid soil, a possible source of the dust. Asian dust samples contained 2.5×10(7) to 3.5×10(9) copies of the 16S rRNA gene g...

[1] Since mineral aerosols absorb significant amounts of infrared radiation, they may contribute to errors in the retrievals of atmospheric and surface parameters from the TIROS Operational Vertical Sounder (TOVS) High-Resolution Infrared Radiation Sounder (HIRS) if the atmosphere is assumed clear. TOVS is an operational sounder on NOAA polar satellites. To see if observed brightness temperatur...

Context. It is known that the Canary Islands are normally affected by dominant winds flowing from north-northeast, that in some meteorological conditions, can transport sand from the Sahara desert at high altitude. The dust may affect the efficiency of the telescopes and decrease the transparency of the sky. Aims. To maximize the scientific return of the telescopes located at the Observatorio d...

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...

Dust storms are a common phenomenon in arid and semi-arid areas, and their impacts on both physical and human environments are of great interest. Number of studies have associated atmospheric PM pollution in urban environments with origin in natural soil/dust, but less evaluated the dust spatial patterns over a city. We aimed to analyze the spatial-temporal behavior of PM concentrations over th...

Abstract. We investigate the production of equatorial jets which demonstrate strong local super-rotation in an atmospheric general circulation model of Mars. These westerly jets are driven by diurnal thermal tides and their strength is shown to be closely related to the amount of dust in the atmosphere. The super-rotating jets are strongest near to equinox and under conditions of high atmospher...

The EU-project MINATROC (MINeral dust And TROpospheric Chemistry) aims at enabling an estimation of the influence of mineral dust, a major, but to date largely ignored component of tropospheric aerosol, on tropospheric oxidant cycles. Within the scope of this project continuous atmospheric measurements of gas-phase HNO3 and SO2 were conducted in June and July 2000 at the CNR WMO station, situat...

Desert areas are usually characterized by a continuous deposition of fine airborne particles. Over time, this process results in the accumulation of silt and clay on desert surfaces. We evaluated health effects associated with regional atmospheric dust, or geogenic dust, deposited on surfaces in the Nellis Dunes Recreation Area (NDRA) in Clark County, Nevada, a popular off-road vehicle (ORV) re...

Atmospheric deposition is an important but still poorly constrained source of trace micronutrients to the open ocean because of the dearth of in situ measurements of total deposition (i.e., wet +dry deposition) in remote regions. In this work, we discuss the upper ocean distribution of dissolved Fe and Al in the eastern Indian Ocean along a 95°E meridional transect spanning the Antarctic margin...