Evaluation of the effect of the SMOS/AMSRE soil moisture estimates on dust emission over MENA region

Atmospheric dust is simulated over the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region using the Shao et al. (1996) parameterization scheme to quantify the effect of the soil moisture in the total emission. For that purpose, six dust sources were selected over the region. For each location, an exhaustive dataset of SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity), AMSR-E (Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-EOS), ECMWF (European Centre for MediumRange Weather Forecasting), and AERONET (Aerosol Robotic Network) data were collected from 2010 to 2011. Depending on the location, the obtained dust flux show better correlation with the SMOS soil moisture estimates than the AMSR-E soil moisture estimates, especially in the seasonal scale. The sensitivity analysis of the dust flux to the soil moisture shows their high dependencies.