Impacts of El Niño-Southern Oscillation on surface dust levels across the world during 1982-2019.

Dust pollution has become a significant concern worldwide. Both human activities and climate conditions affect dust levels. This study investigates the influence of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), an important large-scale climate phenomenon, on surface dust levels in different regions. We used surface dust concentrations from Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications version 2 reanalysis and Southern Oscillation index (SOI) as dust and ENSO indicators, respectively. First, we first described characteristics of the global surface dust concentrations spanning a period of 37 years (1982-2019). Subsequently, we investigated the associations between monthly surface dust concentrations and SOI in regions with relative high dust levels, (i.e., North Africa, Northwest China and Mongolia, the Middle East, and South Australia) using time-series generalized additive models, controlled for meteorological variables and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). In order to capture the delayed effects of ENSO on dust, we fitted the model for SOI with 13 different moving averages starting from 12 months before. The highest average surface dust concentration for our study regions was 306.68 μg/m

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Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.