Mediterranean dust outbreaks, dynamic meteorological patterns and weather types

Dust outbreak events characterized by high PM10 concentration values are frequently caused by long range transport of particulate matter originating from desert areas. Over the Mediterranean basin several of such events are recorded each year, that decisively contribute to the exceedance of legal limit values for PM10. Hence the quantitative characterization of the desert dust episodes is very important. Such events are the result of a sequence of dynamical events, beginning with the dust uplift in desert areas, followed by the high altitude long-range transport and terminating with the deposition in remote regions much far away from the origin. An approach for the identification of such events has been devised by merging numerical modelling results with observed data from an air quality monitoring stations network. Moreover, this analysis has been completed by integrating its results with a recently implemented local weather types classification approach.