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Mineral dust aerosols can influence the Earth's climate system to a significant degree and have a strong effect on terrestrial and oceanic biogeochemical cycles. As one step in quantifying dust sources, sinks, and transport, this paper seeks to quantify the presence of dust storms in the Sahara desert, which is the most active worldwide source of dust.

Our work is based on the SEVIRI infrared imager on-board the geostationary Meteosat-8 satellite, providing three separate channels at a 3km by 3km resolution. The significant challenge is that the infrared channels are highly influenced by the presence of water clouds and surface temperatures, which complicate the identification of dust-cloud anomalies. This paper develops a method of spatio-temporal background estimation from sparse data as a way of recovering dust images and presents results on real data.