干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

With the aim to achieve quantitative monitoring of sand-dust storms in real time, wind-profiling radar is applied to monitor and study the process of four sand-dust storms in the Tazhong area of the Taklimakan Desert. Through evaluation and analysis of the spatial-temporal distribution of reflectivity factor, it is found that reflectivity factor ranges from 2 to 18 dBz under sand-dust storm weather. Using echo power spectrum of radar vertical beams, sand-dust particle spectrum and sand-dust mass concentration at the altitude of 600 similar to 1500 m are retrieved. This study shows that sand-dust mass concentration reaches 700aEuro,mu g/m(3) under blowing sand weather, 2000aEuro,mu g/m(3) under sand-dust storm weather, and 400aEuro,mu g/m(3) under floating dust weather. The following equations are established to represent the relationship between the reflectivity factor and sand-dust mass concentration: Z = 20713.5aEuro,M (0.995) under floating dust weather, Z = 22988.3aEuro,M (1.006) under blowing sand weather, and Z = 24584.2aEuro,M (1.013) under sand-dust storm weather. The retrieval results from this paper are almost consistent with previous monitoring results achieved by former researchers; thus, it is implied that wind-profiling radar can be used as a new reference device to quantitatively monitor sand-dust storms.