Inter-regional atmospheric transport of Australian dust

The Australian continent is arguably the principal source of tropospheric dust in the Southern Hemisphere. Dust entrained from this source by troughs and associated cold fronts is transported thousands of kilometres beyond the continent's shorelines into the South Pacific and Southern Ocean. Early evidence of this southeast dust path was obtained from dune orientations in central Australia (Bowler, 1976) and confirmed from meteorological records of dust storm occurrence (McTainsh and Leys, 1993) in conjunction with ground based monitoring (McTainsh and Lynch, 1996). But limited evidence has been presented of individual dust plume trajectories and transport times. Recently, a kinematic trajectory model that uses observed and/or modeled three dimensional wind field data has been used to compute the movement of air parcels from known dust storms in the semi-arid agricultural lands of southeastern and central Australia, Results indicate that air parcels which are likely to contain dust from these source areas follow west - east pathways that frequently display considerable spatial and temporal variability.