Saharan dust: sources and trajectories

The Sahara is the world's largest source of aeolian desert dust, but precise information on specific sources of this material is poor and sometimes contradictory. This paper uses daily data from the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) for 1999 to identify source areas for major dust events and their trajectories of long-range transport. Two major source areas are identified: the Bodele depression and an area covering eastern Mauritania, western Mali and southern Algeria. Both of these major dust sources are primarily driven by natural factors since they are little affected by anthropogenic activities.