Statistical analysis of dust storms in the United Arab Emirates

Document Type

Article

Source of Publication

Atmospheric Research

Publication Date

1-1-2020

Abstract

© 2019 Elsevier B.V. Desert dust storms perturb economic activities and are dangerous for human health. Since such phenomena are frequent across the United Arab Emirates (UAE), this paper presents the results of the analysis of a data set of eight years (2010–2017) obtained from Hourly Global Surface data (DS3505) datasets from the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) Climate Data, at eight international airports in the UAE. The observations were classified based on the dust storm intensity in Severe dust storm, Dust storm, Blowing dust and None, and studied per month, season, year and location. The existence of similarities of the events from each site has been tested. It was shown that Blowing dust and None series are not stationary and a have monotonic trend (opposite to each other). Change points are emphasized for the same series, mainly in 2013. Five clusters were built for the monthly series, showing once again the dissimilarities of the dust storm events at the eight international airports.

ISSN

0169-8095

Publisher

Elsevier Ltd

Volume

231

First Page

104669

Disciplines

Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Keywords

Cluster, Dust storm, Season, Trend, Visibility

Scopus ID

85072059266

Indexed in Scopus

yes

Open Access

no

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