ABSTRACT The Mediterranean, Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region exhibits distinctive climate behavior, shaped by complex topography and large‐scale circulation, while warming and aridification intensify extremes. Desert dust, present year‐round at high concentrations, perturbs the radiative budget, interacts with clouds, and modulates the evolution of high‐impact events—directly affecting health, transport, aviation, and regional economies. Existing regional and global aerosol reanalyses offer broad coverage, but in most cases do not provide long‐term, dust‐inclusive fields at high spatial resolution for the Mediterranean–MENA region. To address this gap, we introduce TURAAB, a 34‐year (1990–2023), 6 km horizontal resolution, hourly regional reanalysis for the MENA–Mediterranean domain. The climatology delivers a consistent suite of atmospheric and dust‐related fields across surface, column, and pressure levels. We evaluate core meteorological variables against ground‐based observation networks and place particular emphasis on dust, benchmarking against established observational and reanalysis products. Overall, the system performs robustly across regions and regimes. TURAAB supports both climatological analyses and event‐scale diagnostics, enabling detection of trends, anomalies, and potential climate shifts in meteorological and dust fields. By coupling high spatial–temporal detail with multi‐decadal consistency, it provides a policy‐relevant foundation for research, climate‐risk assessment, mitigation planning, and other applications in air quality and health, solar‐energy performance, and transport/aviation operations. The dataset also offers operational relevance for dust‐prone regions, where high‐frequency dust events demand fine‐scale, high‐frequency monitoring.
Πατλάκας et al. (2026) studied this question.