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In order to examine the decadal variations of the dust events over East Asia, we analyze surface observations from 701 meteorological stations for the period 1960-2004 to obtain spatial and temporal distributions of dust events. Since the Taklamakan Desert in western China and the Gobi Desert in Inner Mongolia are the two major sources of dust storms, we have defined two dust indices, one for the Taklamakan Desert Index (TDI) and one for the Gobi Desert Index (GDI), to characterize the statistical nature of the dust events over these two regions. Both of these indices are well correlated with the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) Absorbing Aerosol Index (AAI). TDI and GDI time series exhibit a decreasing trend since the mid-1980s, and is likely caused by an enhanced geopotential height over the Mongolian plateau and the middle Siberian region, as well as by an anomalous shift in the phase and intensity of the stationary wave over. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.