11.5 Fundamentals of Aeolian Sediment Transport: Long-Range Transport of Dust

Mineral dust has the capability to be transported from its source regions as far as thousands of kilometers away. The first quantitative evidence of long-range transport of mineral dust was provided by in situ surface monitoring of aerosol composition in the early 1970s. Since the 1980s the investigation of this long-range transport has strongly benefited from the development of satellite imagery. The temporal resolution of satellite imagery also allows tracking of individual dust storms from their source regions and along their transport paths. It also provides quantitative information on the aerosol atmospheric content and thus an estimation of the intensity of mineral dust export. Extensive information on the mineral dust spatial distribution and physico-chemical properties has been provided by large and extensive field campaigns. From all these information sources, global pictures of the main transport pattern in the regions where this transport is the most intense have been established; some mechanisms responsible for its variability at the seasonal and interannual scale have been described and the amount of dust transported has been quantified.