Dust storm simulation over Iran using HYSPLIT

Particulate matters have detrimental effects on human health, environment and economic. this pollutant may emitfrom anthropogenic or natural sources. on global scale, main proportion of natural particulate matter release to theatmosphere because of wind erosion from arid and semi-arid regions. recently, the amount of dust coming fromarabian countries has dramatically increased, especially dust storms that are affecting western and even centralparts of iran. this phenomenon has caused a lot of environmental problems. dust source identification and trajectorysimulation using numerical techniques are the main aims of this study. hysplit (hybrid single particle lagrangianintegrated trajectory) model dust module and trajectory simulation are utilized in this research and two casestudies are investigated (in may and june 2010). the base of the hysplit dust module is the pm10 dust stormemission algorithm for desert land use. this methodology is applied to estimate hotspots and trajectories. dueto the results, dust storms started on may 17th and june 7th because of high wind shear ( > 8.5 m/s) from thewestern syrian desert. the source region limited to 32.50 °n to 33.80 °n and 38.00 °e to 38.80 °e coordinates.dust plumes lifted and dispersed towards the east and southeast of the sources and reached ahvaz on may18th and june 8th. the average of pm10 concentration in these dates reached 625 and 494 ?gm3 on ahvaz monitoringstations, respectively. moreover, the results gained from the model for dust motion simulation are similar to the modissatellite images.