Remote Sensing Data Analysis for the Effects of Three Selected Aerosols on Both Energy Budgets and Health: A Case of South-West Asia

Dust is associated with numerous hazards to the ecosystem; the dust aerosol affects the community health by polluting the breathable air and its effects on the balance of radiant energy are quite important for scientific research. Aerosols scatter and absorb solar radiation: some aerosols contribute to the heating of the earth and others to the cooling. With those problems, this research presents the behavior of three selected aerosols: dust, black carbon (BC) and sulfate (SO
₄
). The aerosol optical thickness (AOT) extinction behaviors were analyzed in comparison with the cloud amount and the surface skin temperature. In addition, we have quantitatively analyzed the dust's particulate matter (PM
_2.5
), in the chosen region of interest (RoI). In all cases of this research, in the nearly recent 28 years (from Jan. 1991 to Jul. 2019), the aerosols data source is the second version of the modern-era retrospective analysis for research and applications (MERRA-2). A selection of the focal study region in south-west Asia was due to its location in the world's dust-belt. Goddard interactive online visualization and analysis infrastructure, GIOVANNI, bridged our research objectives to the data; the Geographical Information System (GIS ArcMap) is one of the software tools that has been utilized to treat the map-based results. In results, among the three selected aerosols, the increase of the dust aerosol always associates with the decrease of the cloud amount in all the seasons of the focal region of interest. Regarding the effects of aerosols on earth's energy balance, the upwelling longwave flux at the top of atmosphere under clear sky and no aerosol conditions was analyzed with the same longwave flux under normal conditions. On side of health effects in the focal region of interest, all seasons suffer from the heaviest dust's fine particulate matter (PM
_2.5
). Though there might exist some examples of afforested deserts in Asia, which can be accounted for a good solution to the desert's dust aerosols, we would recommend further studies about strategies to mitigate the dust hazards on both health and energy budgets.