Dust Awareness Service

Desert Dust Aerosol Computation in NRT from SEVIRI Images

Service main objective is to significant presence of desert dust arriving to populated places. With this service is intended to prevent serious healthy problems (mainly respiratory), which means to improve the life quality of the citizens. Furthermore, the detection and tracking of desert dust events towards populated areas can be usefully exploited in linking those events to threshold exceedings of PM concentrations measured at surface.

The desert dust awareness service is based on the measurements of SEVIRI instrument on board MSG-1 and MSG-2 satellites. The service will use infra-red bands and visible bands. In particular, visible bands can provide quantitative information on parameters such as Aerosol Optical Depth and Angstrom Coefficient. Infra-red bands, on the other hand, can be adopted to enhance the presence of a desert dust transport towards the regions of interest. The repetition cycle of SEVIRI measurements allows the tracking of desert dust outbreaks. Based on this distribution the service has been splitted into two different areas:

		Iberian Subservice Description : Aerosol optical depth based algorithm Coverage : Canary Islands, Spain and Portugal Period : Feb 2006 - today (test period Sep 2004) Data type : NetCDF files, HTML web information and SMS messages
		Italian Subservice Description : Desert dust transport and detection based on SEVIRI IR bands Coverage : Saharan, Mediterranean and Italian areas Period : Aug 2005 - today Data type : Animated GIF and PNG images, GeoTIFF on demand, HTML web information

Last modified: June 2007