Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Mineral dusts, as the most important type of aerosols, play an important role in climate forcing and terribly affect human health, living in the vicinity of large persistent emission sources; especially located in the arid or hyper arid regions of Middle Eastern countries like Iran. In this paper, we systematically examine the TOMS satellite absorbing aerosol product (AI) over a 25-year period (1979-2004) for the evidence of local persistent dust sources, and simultaneously evaluate the most related synoptical parameters to dust emission derived from data records of more than 150 synoptical weather stations located all around the country. We also study two local prominent emission sources based on recent evaluation results, the first one is Sistan basin which is located between Iran and Afghanistan at ~31°N,61.5°E and the second are border wetlands which are located between Iran and Iraq at 31°N, ~ 46.5°E. Evaluations include the 50 year ground-based measurements in comparison with satellite remote sensing results based on data from MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) on the Aqua satellite. Compared to ground-based measurements, satellite imagery, due to their large spatial coverage and reliable repeated measurements, provide us another important tool to monitor mineral dusts and their prominent emission sources.
Esmaili et al. (Fri,) studied this question.