What caused the unseasonal extreme dust storm in Uzbekistan during November 2021?
Xi X. Steinfeld D. Cavallo S.M. Wang J. Chen J. Zulpykharov K. Henebry G.M.
1 November 2023Institute of Physics
Environmental Research Letters
2023#18Issue 11
An unseasonal dust storm hit large parts of Central Asia on 4-5 November 2021, setting records for the column aerosol burden and fine particulate concentration in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The dust event originated from an agropastoral region in southern Kazakhstan, where the soil erodibility was enhanced by a prolonged agricultural drought resulting from La Niña-related precipitation deficit and persistent high atmospheric evaporative demand. The dust outbreak was triggered by sustained postfrontal northerly winds during an extreme cold air outbreak. The cold air and dust outbreaks were preceded by a chain of processes consisting of recurrent synoptic-scale transient Rossby wave packets over the North Pacific and North Atlantic, upper-level wave breaking and blocking over Greenland, followed by high-latitude blocking over Northern Europe and West Siberia, and the equatorward shift of a tropopause polar vortex and cold pool into southern Kazakhstan. Our study suggests that the historic dust storm in Uzbekistan was a compound weather event driven by cold extreme, high winds, and drought precondition.
Central Asia , cold air outbreak , dust storm , extreme event , La Niña
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Department of Geological and Mining Engineering and Sciences, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI, United States
Institute of Geography, Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
School of Meteorology, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, United States
Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research, Iowa Technology Institute, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, United States
Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, United States
Center for Global Change and Earth Observations, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, United States
Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences, Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, Almaty, Kazakhstan
Department of Geological and Mining Engineering and Sciences
Institute of Geography
School of Meteorology
Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering
Department of Geography
Center for Global Change and Earth Observations
Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences
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