Abstract
Atmospheric aerosols and dust have become a challenge for urban air quality. The pre-sented study quantified seasonal spatio-temporal variations of aerosols, tropospheric ozone, and dust over the Middle East (ME) for the year 2012 by using the HTAP emission inventory in the WRF-Chem model. Simulated gaseous pollutants, aerosols and dust were evaluated against satellite measurements and reanalysis datasets. Meteorological parameters, temperature, and wind vector were evaluated against MERRA2. The model showed high spatio-temporal variability in meteorological parameters during summer and low variability in winter. The correlation coefficients for all the parameters are estimated to be 0.92, 0.93, 0.98, and 0.89 for January, April, July, and October respectively, indicating that the WRF-Chem model reproduced results very well. Simulated monthly mean AOD values were maximum in July (1.0–1.5) and minimum in January (0.1–0.4) while April and October were in the range of 0.6–1.0 and 0.3–0.7 respectively. Simulated dust concentrations were high in April and July. The monthly average aerosol concentration was highest over Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates and Jeddah, Makkah. The contributions to urban air pollution were highest over Makkah city with more than 25% from anthropogenic sources.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 2112 |
Journal | Remote Sensing |
Volume | 13 |
Issue number | 11 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - May 27 2021 |
Bibliographical note
KAUST Repository Item: Exported on 2021-06-21Acknowledgements: We thank and acknowledge Dr. Suleiman Mostamandy (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) for assistance in the statistical evaluation of model meteorological parameters. The editorial and consultancy support from Adaptive AgroTech and Redmond R. Shamshiri is duly acknowledged.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Earth and Planetary Sciences