Relationship between net primary production (NPP) and dust storms in different land cover classes

Abstract

Iran has been a prime target of dust storms, mostly with exogenous origins arising from its neighboring countries. Dust storms generally depend on two factors, namely wind speed and soil erosion threshold, the latter being highly dependent on vegetation. Meanwhile, remote sensing data and imagery allow for monitoring vegetation changes in different spatial and temporal scales, particularly through vegetation indices commonly found in the literature. Still, these indices suffer from certain shortcomings such as a lack of quantitative outcomes and sensitivity to greenness. Net primary production (NPP) is a measure of carbon content absorbed by plants through photosynthesis and is not affected by the shortcomings seen in vegetation indices. This study explored the relationship between NPP and dust storms in the Tigris and Euphrates basin. AOD values derived from MODIS data were used to measure dust and NPP values for different land cover types. The research findings showed that the highest correlation between AOD and NPP was found in the evergreen coniferous forest class with a Pearson correlation coefficient of negative 0.5326.