How CAMAERA can improve CAMS dust products

Desert dust is one of the most abundant aerosol species worldwide. The generally high and often exceptional particulate matter concentrations in the vicinity of dust sources cause both acute health problems and contribute to the long-term exposure with associated health risks and excess mortality. Reduced visibility during dust events can interrupt road and air traffic, cause accidents and reduce solar electricity production, the latter aggravated by deposited dust, resulting in high economical costs.

A recent study (Ryder et al., 2024) quantifies the engine dust ingestion at airports worldwide and suggests mitigation action to reduce engine dust damage. Authors, among them experts from ECMWF and HYGEOS, have used the dust concentrations as provided in the CAMS reanalysis dataset. CAMAERA has the ambition to improve such CAMS dust products by upgrading the parameterization of dust emissions in the global and regional production systems through a threefold approach:

1. exploring the use of machine learning techniques to compute dust emissions at global scale.
2. focusing on high latitude dust which have a potentially large local, regional, and global significance to climate and environment as short-lived climate forcers, air pollutants, and nutrient sources
3. developing and testing a gridded version of the regional NORTRIP emission module at the European scale in the EMEP, EURAD-IM and LOTOS EUROS models

First results are expected at the mid-term of the project, by June 2025.

Ryder, C. L., C., Bézier, H. F. Dacre, R. Clarkson, V. Amiridis, E. Marinou, E. Proestakis, Z. Kipling, A. Benedetti, M. Parrington, S. Rémy, and M. Vaughan, Aircraft engine dust ingestion at global airports, Natural Hazards Earth System Science, 24, 2263–2284, 2024. https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-24-2263-2024