Satellite images show two unusual DIBS storms forming over Europe in March

In March 2022, several large storms brought Saharan dust clouds to Europe. One also brought persistent, dust-laden high-altitude cirrus clouds, causing widespread cloud cover from Iberia to the Arctic for more than a week. It's an unusual type of storm that scientists have only recently begun to understand. Known as a dust-injected baroclinic storm (DIBS), it is characterized by icy dust-filled clouds.

In mid-March, atmospheric rivers containing Saharan dust were entrained by DIBS and rose into the troposphere, reaching an altitude of 10 kilometers. This dust acts as nucleating particles for ice, leading to the formation of icy, dust-laden high-altitude cirrus clouds. They lasted for nearly a week and covered much of Europe and Asia.

"Effectively, two DIBS are formed," said Mike Fromm, a meteorologist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. "The fact that the dust river supports two separate DIBS makes this noteworthy because more It is common to see a single storm arising from an influx of dust. ”

The first storm began on March 15, 2022, over north-central Europe, from Poland, the Czech Republic and Austria. Spreading southward into the eastern Mediterranean. This is also unusual, Fromm said, because "usually DIBS has a direct link to its dry dust source, much closer to the desert itself."

On March 16, the second storm followed a classic pattern, spinning close to the dust source in Africa. This large, widespread dust cloud continues to move north over Europe, towards Scandinavia and the Arctic Ocean. It then moved eastward over northern Russia before undergoing an anticyclonic turn back toward Eastern Europe and the Black Sea on March 20.

In the photo above, the cloud top has a sunken appearance. This image was obtained by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite on March 17, 2022. "We still don't know why this is happening," Fromm said, "but it's unique to DIBS."

Colin Seftor, an atmospheric scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, on the mid-March storm Analysis shows that most of the dust circulates at the top of the clouds. "This means there is enough dust at the top of the clouds to give the normally white clouds a dusty tint, hence the 'injected' part of the name," Fromm said. "In DIBS, dust and storm clouds are integrated."

March 17, 2022

The map above shows the model based on the Goddard Earth Observing System version 5 (GEOS-5) dust movement model on March 17.

Fromm said that high dust clouds produced by DIBS have been observed traveling around the world and are sometimes mistaken for volcanic ash, potentially affecting flight routes. They also have local effects. Fromm added that the dust that gets sucked into them tends to linger after the clouds evaporate. Additionally, longer-lasting cirrus clouds can affect temperature and precipitation forecasts.

In late March, another large dust storm began moving north, carrying Saharan dust across the Mediterranean and Europe. Although the latest storm appears to be just as large, it may not be as persistent, Seftor said. “It’s a little unusual to have two big (storms) like this almost back-to-back, but the weather patterns over northern Africa and Europe in the spring seem to be more conducive to producing dust storms that reach Europe than at other times of the year.

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