On the relations between land-surface Water Use Efficiency and Asian dust storms in the Northeast Asia

Abstract:

Asian dust storm is one of major environmental issures in the Northeast Asia. The dust storm occurrence is typically influenced by both atmospheric (i.e. pressure, wind speed, precipitation, etc.) and land-surface conditions (i.e. vegetation cover and vitality, soil dryness, etc). Severe water stess in arid and semi-arid regions can resulted in reduction of vegetation cover fraction ultimately. Plant physiological change might however precede the vegetation structural change by regulating leaf stomatal resistance. In this study, we tested whether plant physiological index can be used for early indicator of plant recession causing dust storm increase. For the purpose, satellite-based eco-physiological variables such as gross primary production (GPP), evapotranspiration (ET), and water use efficiency (WUE) were prepared and then, compared their spatial and temporal variability with Synop dust storm data for the Northeast Asia. In results, the asian dust storms occurrence decreased in early 2000s but again increased, especially, in eastern mongolia during late 2000s. Our tentative result indicates that this region was appeared consistently low water use efficiency result during the period of late 2000s. In this study, the relations between WUE and dust sorm were interpreted and discussed as a tool for early indicator of land degradation of arid and semi-arid grasslands.