Variation of strong dust storm events in Northern China during 1978–2007

• A concept of dust storm event (DSE) and an index of λ were introduced.
• DSE can describe duration and outbreak area of a complete dust storm process.
• Dust storm frequency (DSF) and DSE in Northern China were in decreasing trends.
• Strong dust storms have increased since 1991 and might bring greater risk in future.

Dust storms have a great significance for global mineral aerosol cycle, marine ecosystem, air quality and human health. Dust storm frequency (DSF), often used as a primary index for understanding a regional characteristic of dust storms. However, DSF couldn't describe the frequency and the outbreak areas of a dust storm event (DSE) which was defined as a dust storm occurred at three or more meteorological stations during the same weather process, because a DSE might occur at several meteorological stations and continue for several days. We defined a new index DSE considering the factors including wind speed, wind direction and spatial variation during a dust storm process. To clarify which index of DSF or DSE is better to describe the characteristics of dust storms, we have used the data sets of dust storm from 319 meteorological stations to calculate the frequency of DSE, and the outbreak area and the duration of each DSE in 1978–2007, as well as to compare the differences between DSE and DSF in spatiotemporal distribution in Northern China. The results showed that the high-value locations of occurrence numbers of DSE and DSF were almost overlapped; from 1978 to 2007, the total values of DSE and DSF decreased from 558 to 201 and from 1273 to 467, respectively, but the mean values of outbreak area and duration of DSE have wavily increased since 1991. These implied that the differences existed between DSE and DSF in describing the characteristics of a regional dust storm, and DSE was a better index for a dust storm to identify the fact of occurrence frequency and outbreak area. The implication of this study was that the values of DSE and DSF have a decrease trends with increase of extreme precipitation events and decrease of mean wind speed under the global warming scenarios, but strong dust storms, which is defined as the outbreak area of an event > 105 km2 here, probably bring greater risk in future.