Aerosol Optical Depth Variation During a Recent Dust Event in North India

Aerosols play a vital role in influencing the climate both by cooling and warming up the Earth’s surface and also by altering the cloud properties. Due to natural and large amount of anthropogenic factors, Indian region observes high variability of loadings in aerosols both in terms of space and time in the planetary boundary layer. Dust storms in India exert momentous influences on weather, air quality, and climate of the country. Detection and monitoring of aerosol optical depth (AOD) at the time of dust storms is challenging, especially in case of short life time of events, and strong interaction with climatic parameters. This paper addresses the study of a dust storm event which hit Indian (North) region on June 13, 2015 parts of Haryana, Punjab, Delhi, UP were affected. AOD variations over the North Indian region has been studied using MODIS level 2 data (MOD04) obtained NASA Terra platform at a spatial resolution of 10 km × 10 km.