@article{4f6f4fd158d54498a875d020ed6ec70d,
title = "The dust load and radiative impact associated with the June 2020 historical Saharan dust storm",
abstract = "In June 2020, a major dust outbreak occurred in the Sahara that impacted the tropical Atlantic Ocean. In this study, the dust load and radiative forcing of the dust plumes on both the atmosphere and ocean surface is investigated by means of observations and modelling. We estimated dust loadings in excess of 8 Tg over the eastern tropical Atlantic, comparable to those observed over the desert during major Saharan dust storms. The dust induced an up to 1.1 K net warming of the ocean surface and a 1.8K warming of the air temperature (i.e., two to three times the respective climatological standard deviations), with a +14 W m−2 (∼28% of the mean value) increase in the surface net radiation flux at night. As the dust plumes extended all the way to the Caribbean, it is possible that this historical dust event helped fuel the record-breaking 2020 Atlantic hurricane season.",
keywords = "Dust aerosols, Radiative forcing, Sahara, Tropical Atlantic, WRF-Chem",
author = "Diana Francis and Narendra Nelli and Ricardo Fonseca and Michael Weston and Cyrille Flamant and Charfeddine Cherif",
note = "Funding Information: We wish to acknowledge the contribution of Khalifa University's high-performance computing and research computing facilities to the results of this research. The SEVIRI satellite images were downloaded from The European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites website (https://eoportal.eumetsat.int/). On the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization's website, VIIRS (https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/smcd/emb/viirs_aerosol/products.php), CERES (https://ceres.larc.nasa.gov/data/) and GHRSST (http://ghrsst.nodc.noaa.gov) data are available, while MODIS (https://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/) and AERONET (https://aeronet.gsfc.nasa.gov/) data can be downloaded on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's website. All the data used in the present analysis are available here https://zenodo.org/record/4572733#.YKYoQqgzY2x. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2021 The Authors",
year = "2022",
month = jan,
day = "1",
doi = "10.1016/j.atmosenv.2021.118808",
language = "British English",
volume = "268",
journal = "Atmospheric Environment",
issn = "1352-2310",
publisher = "Elsevier Ltd",
}