Accurately predicting ambient dust plays a crucial role in air quality management and hazard mitigation. Dust emission is a complex, non-linear response to several climatic variables. This study explores the accuracy of Artificial Intelligence (AI) models: an adaptive-network-based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) and a multi-layered perceptron artificial neural network (mlp-NN), over the Southwestern United States (SWUS), based on the observed dust data from IMPROVE stations. The ambient fine dust (PM2.5) and coarse dust (PM10) concentrations on monthly and seasonal timescales from 1990–2020 are modeled using average daily maximum wind speed (W), average precipitation (P), and average air temperature (T) available from the North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR) dataset. The model’s performance is measured using correlation (r), root mean square error (RMSE), and percentage bias (% BIAS). The ANFIS model generally performs better than the mlp-NN model in predicting regional dustiness over the SWUS region, with r = 0.77 and 0.83 for monthly and seasonal fine dust, respectively. AI models perform better in predicting regional dustiness on a seasonal timescale than the monthly timescale for both fine dust and coarse dust. AI models better predict fine dust than coarse dust on both monthly and seasonal timescales. Compared to precipitation, air temperature is the more important predictor of regional dustiness on both monthly and seasonal timescales. The relative importance of air temperature is higher on the monthly timescale than the seasonal timescale for PM2.5 and vice versa for PM10. The findings of this study demonstrate that the AI models can predict monthly and seasonal fine and coarse dust, based on the limited climatic data, with good accuracy and with potential implications for research in data sparse regions.
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