Operational Dust Prediction - Mineral Dust: A Key Player in the Earth System - page 221

challenges owing to the complexity of the system. At the centre of the problem is the
vast range of scales required to fully account for all of the physical processes related
to dust. Another limiting factor is the paucity of suitable dust observations available
for model, evaluation and assimilation. This chapter discusses in detail numerical
prediction of dust with examples from systems that are currently providing dust
forecasts in near real-time or are part of international efforts to establish daily
provision of dust forecasts based on multi-model ensembles. The various models
are introduced and described along with an overview on the importance of dust
prediction activities and a historical perspective. Assimilation and evaluation aspects
in dust prediction are also discussed.
Keywords Dust models ￿ Prediction ￿ Observations ￿ Forecast ￿ Data
assimilation ￿ Aerosol analysis ￿ Multi-model ensembles ￿ Verification metrics ￿
Real-time evaluation
S. Gong ￿ X.-Y. Zhang ￿ C.-H. Zhou
Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences, Beijing, China
e-mail: [e-mail] ; [e-mail] ; [e-mail]
N. Huneeus
Department of Geophysics and Center for Climate and Resilience Research,
University of Chile, Santiago, Chile
e-mail: [e-mail]
S. Lu
National Centers for Environmental Prediction, College Park, MD, USA
e-mail: [e-mail]
S. Nickovic
Institute of Physics Belgrade, Serbia and University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
e-mail: [e-mail]
C. Pérez García-Pando
Department of Applied Physics and Applied Maths, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies,
Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
e-mail: [e-mail]
J.S. Reid ￿ D.L. Westphal
Naval Research Laboratory, Monterey, CA, USA
e-mail: [e-mail] ; [e-mail]
T.T. Sekiyama ￿ T.Y. Tanaka
Japan Meteorological Agency/Meteorological Research Institute, Tsukuba, Japan
e-mail: [e-mail] ; [e-mail]
E. Terradellas
Spanish Meteorological Agency, AEMET, Barcelona, Spain
e-mail: [e-mail]