Publications

Barbulescu, A; Popescu-Bodorin, N; Dumitriu, CS (2022). ON THE AEROSOL OPTICAL DEPTH SERIES IN THE ARABIAN GULF REGION. ROMANIAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICS, 67(9-10).

Abstract
Sand. How much sand is there in the aerosols? Where it came from? It is quite challenging to attempt answering such questions without measurements taken properly at a global scale. Still, we don't have data recorded in this manner and for this purpose. This is why we investigate here some of the available measurements (Terra MODIS satellite data) closely related to dust aerosols and taken over the UAE territory - traditionally affected by intense sand-related (or even sand-driven) meteorological events. We let PCA reveal the principal subspace of the data (i. e. the global scattering tendency within the data) and classification by clustering to search for a natural tendency of grouping the data may have locally. The trend of average series in each cluster is investigated and the seasonal components are revealed. A quite spectacular numeric result arises from the analysis, namely the fact that the subspace of spatially indexed time series is almost one-dimensional. What causes this result stays unexplained for the moment but is another step forward toward qualifying the UAE territory as a dust aerosol source, destination and/or transit region.

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