Forecast & Products
by
Francesco Benincasa
—
last modified
Mar 10, 2011 01:11 PM
The first objective of the Regional Center for Northern Africa, Middle East and Europe is to lead the development and implementation in the region of a comprehensive system for mineral dust observation and forecast, with special emphasis on extreme sand and dust events.
The observational system is aimed to a continuous dust monitoring, validation and verification of forecast products and data assimilation into numerical models. It should include:
- ground observations: particulate matter measurements progressively becoming available in near-real time, indirect information from regular weather reports and remote-sensing retrievals from sun photometers or vertical profilers
- satellite products: single-band images, qualitative multi-band products designed to improve dust identification or quantitative retrievals
The validation and intercomparison of dust forecasts and a future generation of multi-model products is a key point of the programme.