The Dust Model Overview Page
Data Produced by the Dust Model
This is an academic site, which does not replace operational services such as the Israel Meteorological Service.
We do not guarantee the timely publication of forecasts, or indeed any publication of forecasts.
Nor do we guarantee the accuracy of the published forecasts.
There is a direct link from the ISA-MEIDA main page to the
latest Dust loading forecast
for Africa and South Europe, up to 48 hours after the forecast.
Please note that times in the forecasts are
universal time,
also known as
Greenwich time .
For Israel winter-time two hours have to be added to the hour given in the forecasts, and
for Israel summer-time three hours have to be added.
For times at other locations see the Date and Time Gateway .
The forecasts are presented as four 33KB GIF figures and, if wanted, as animations.
Also available are Past Forecasts
from July 2000 and onwards.
The full data produced by the Dust model is available through the
EOS Data Gateway,
and is available directly through FTP at
ftp://ftp.nasa.proj.ac.il/pub/taudust/.
The Dust data files are in GrADS format, with the data in a file with suffix .grd and
the control file with the same name as the data file and with a suffix .ctl.
For more information see the README file.
We request that when publishing data or results using the Dust data, please
acknowledge as follows:
TAU dust forecasts were developed with the
dust prediction system (http://nasa.proj.ac.il/dust-overview.html)
developed at the Weather Research Center (TAU WERC) and
provided by ISA-MEIDA (http://nasa.proj.ac.il/).
History of Development of the Dust
Prediction System at Tel-Aviv University
"The Dust Prediction" effort at Tel-Aviv University was started with
the help of the Univ. of Athens and with the BSF support (September 1998) by the following team:
S. Krichak, M. Tsidulko and J. H. Joseph, P. Alpert.
The real time weather and dust prediction system at Tel Aviv University
is based on the NCEP objective analysis retrieving and assimilation
system that was earlier developed for TAU by S. Krichak
and M. Tsidulko with support from EU Icarus Project in June - July 1998.
This was the result of adaptation of the NCEP Eta
atmospheric model for TAU with the help of F. Mesinger,
D. Jovic and C. Bruyere during and after the 22-26 June 1998 ICTP
Conference in Trieste, Italy, while working on the EU Icarus 2 Project
at CINECA Computer Center, Bologna, Italy.
A version of the Eta model with a package for description of the dust
uptake/transport/deposition processes was adapted by S. Krichak
at Tel Aviv University in October 1998 with active aid from the University
of Athens group: A. Papadopoulos,
O. Kakaliagou and G. Kallos. The system
has been earlier developed at University of Athens
at the framework of the project MEDUSE which was funded from
DG-XII of EU and the Greek Government - EU project SKIRON.
The dust prediction system was put to semi-operative use at Tel-Aviv
University
by S. Krichak and M. Tsidulko in February 1999.
Further significant improvements were performed within the framework of
the BSF and MEIDEX Projects (starting October 1999),
with additional financial MEIDEX support to
M. Tsidulko, H. Shafir and E. Klodz.
These improvements included:
Development of a new dust initialization system using TOMS Aerosol Index
data;
Verification the dust prediction results using various methods; Better
determination of the dust sources ( employing the Paul Ginoux
method developed in NASA/GSFC).
Further details can be found in:
P. Alpert, S. O. Krichak, M. Tsidulko, H. Shafir and J. H. Joseph,
"A dust prediction system with TOMS initialization",
Mon, Wea. Rev., Vol. 130, No. 9, pp. 2335-2345, 2002.
The WEB page was created by R. Parparov with help of the EOSDIS Node
in Israel (ISA-MEIDA).
Please also see the MEIDEX address:
http://www.tau.ac.il/geophysics/MEIDEX
Technical description of
the model in a brief
|
Last update : 27 February 2005
