Newly desertified regions in Iraq and its surrounding areas: Significant novel sources of global dust particles

• Extracting a new high resolution desertification map for Iraq and surrounding areas.
• Using a newly developed Middle East Dust Index (MEDI) to identify major dust source points.
• Major dust source points are located in newly anthropogenically desertified regions.
• Categorization of dust source points in terms of intensity and frequency.
• Low frequency sources are located within or close to the newly desertified regions.

Using the newly developed Middle East Dust Index (MEDI) applied to MODIS satellite data, we consider a relationship between the recent desertified regions, over the past three decades, and the dust source points identified during the period of 2001–2012. Results indicate that major source points are located in Iraq and Syria, and by implementing the spectral mixture analysis on the Landsat TM images (1984 and 2012), a novel desertification map was extracted. Results of this study indicate for the first time that c.a., 39% of all detected source points are located in this newly anthropogenically desertified area. Using extracted indices for Deep Blue algorithm, dust sources were classified into three levels of intensity: low, medium, and high. A large number of low frequency sources are located within or close to the newly desertified areas. These severely desertified regions require immediate concern at a global scale.