Saharan dust plumes studied at KIT
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Saharan dust plumes are typical events in Western Europe especially during springtime. We detected Saharan dust during a recent event with ground based aerosol particle sizers and studied the spatial structure and evolution of the Saharan dust plume using a scanning aerosol LIDAR. Especially, the depolarization of the backscattered laser radiation is very sensitive to airborne non-spherical dust particles. We use the detailed observation of the mineral dust plumes also to validate predictions of such events by transport models like ICON-ART.