Long-term associations between land-surface indicators and dust-storm occurrence along the margins of the Taklimakan Desert

Land-surface change and atmospheric variability jointly shape dust activity in arid regions. We examined land-cover transitions, station dust-storm records, a Sentinel-1 backscatter index, meteorological variables from the fifth-generation European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts reanalysis (ERA5) and dust diagnostics from the Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (MERRA-2) along the margins of the Taklimakan Desert. Within the mapped domain, grassland increased from 9.45% in 1990 to 10.59% in 2023, while barren land decreased from 86.45% to 82.30%. Annual dust-storm-day trends were negative at 21 of 30 stations over available 1990–2024 records, and Sentinel-1 index trends were positive at 22 stations during 2015–2024. Mixed-effects path analysis of 3,804 station-month observations showed that the Sentinel-1 index was negatively associated with modelled dust emission (standardized coefficient = − 0.191; 95% confidence interval: −0.289 to − 0.043). The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and friction velocity had the highest training-set feature importance in the random forest analysis.