Trans‐Pacific transport of Saharan dust to western North America: A case study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The first documented case of long‐range transport of Saharan dust over a pathway spanning Asia and the Pacific to western North America is described. Crustal material generated by North African dust storms during the period 28 February to 3 March 2005 reached western Canada on 13–14 March 2005 and was observed by lidar and sunphotometer in the Vancouver region and by high‐altitude aerosol instrumentation at Whistler Peak. Global chemical models (GEOS‐Chem and NRL NAAPS) confirm the transport pathway and suggest source attribution was simplified in this case by the distinct, and somewhat unusual, lack of dust activity over Eurasia (Gobi and Takla Makan deserts) at this time. Over western North America the dust layer, although subsiding close to the boundary layer, did not appear to contribute to boundary layer particulate matter concentrations. Furthermore, sunphotometer observations (and associated inversion products) suggest that the dust layer had only subtle optical impact (aerosol optical thickness ( τ a500 ) and Ångström exponent ( α 440–870 ) were 0.1 and 1.2, respectively) and was dominated by fine particulate matter (modes in aerodynamic diameter at 0.3 and 2.5 μ m). High‐altitude observations at Whistler, British Columbia, confirm the crustal origin of the layer (rich in Ca ++ ions) and the bimodal size distribution. Although a weak event compared to the Asian trans‐Pacific dust events of 1998 and 2001, this novel case highlights the possibility that Saharan sources may contribute episodically to the aerosol burden in western North America.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".