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Dust storms are one of the major causes of the destruction of natural ecosystems and human infrastructure worldwide. Therefore, the identification and mapping of susceptible regions to dust storm formation (SRDSFs) is of great importance. Determining SRDSFs by considering the concept of risk in the decision-making process and the kind of manager's attitude and planning can be very valuable in dedicating financial resources and time to identifying and controlling the negative impacts of SRDSFs. The purpose of this study was to present a new risk-based method in decision making to create SRDSF maps of pessimistic and optimistic scenarios. To achieve the purpose of this research, effective criteria obtained from various sources were used, including simulated surface data, satellite products, and soil data of Saudi Arabia. These effective criteria included vegetation cover, soil moisture, soil erodibility, wind speed, precipitation, and absolute air humidity. For this purpose, the ordered weighted averaging (OWA) model was employed to generate existing SRDSF maps in different scenarios. The results showed that the wind speed and precipitation criteria had the highest and lowest impact in identifying dust centers, respectively. The areas identified as SRDSFs in very pessimistic, pessimistic, neutral, optimistic, and very optimistic scenarios were 85,950, 168,275, 255,225, 410,000, and 596,500 km2, respectively. The overall accuracy of very pessimistic, pessimistic, neutral, optimistic, and very optimistic scenarios were 84.1, 83.3, 81.6, 78.2, and 73.2%, respectively. The very pessimistic scenario can identify the SRDSFs in the study area with higher accuracy. The overall accuracy of the results of these scenarios compared to the dust sources obtained from the previous studies were 92.7, 94.2, 95.1, 88.4, and 79.7% respectively. The dust sources identified in the previous studies have a higher agreement with the results of the neutral scenario. The proposed method has high flexibility in producing a wide range of SRDSF maps in very pessimistic to very optimistic scenarios. The results of the pessimistic scenarios are suitable for risk-averse managers with limited financial resources and time, and the results of the optimistic scenarios are suitable for risk-taking managers with sufficient financial resources and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, dust has created many problems, including negative effects on health, and environmental and economic costs, for people who live both near to and far from sources of dust. The aim of this study is to evaluate and quantify the impact of dust sources located inside Saudi Arabia on the physical growth and vegetation status of cities. In order to do so, satellite data sets, simulated surface data, and soil data for Saudi Arabia from 2000 to 2021 were used. In the first step, a dust sources map of the study area was generated using multi-criteria decision analysis. Land surface temperature (LST), vegetation cover, soil moisture, precipitation, air humidity, wind speed, and soil erodibility factors were considered as effective criteria in identifying dust sources. In the second step, built-up land and vegetation status maps of major cities located at different distances from dust sources were generated for different years based on spectral indicators. Then, the spatiaotemporal change of built-up land and vegetation status of the study area and major cities were extracted. Finally, impacts of major dust sources on urban physical growth and vegetation were quantified. The importance degrees of soil erodibility, wind speed, soil moisture, vegetation cover, LST, air humidity, and precipitation to identify dust sources were 0.22, 0.20, 0.16, 0.15, 0.14, 0.07, and 0.05, respectively. Thirteen major dust sources (with at least 8 years of repetition) were identified in the study area based on the overlap of the effective criteria. The identified major dust sources had about 300 days with Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) values greater than 0.85, which indicates that these dust sources are active. The location of the nine major dust sources identified in this study corresponds to the location of the dust sources identified in previous studies. The physical growth rates of cities located <400 km or >400 km from a major dust source (DMDS) are 46.2% and 95.4%, respectively. The reduction rates of average annual normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) in these sub-regions are 0.006 and 0.002, respectively. The reduction rate of the intensity of vegetation cover in the sub-region close to dust sources is three times higher than that of the sub-region farther from dust sources. The coefficients of determination (R2) between the DMDS and urban growth rate and the NDVI change rate are 0.52 and 0.73, respectively, which indicates that dust sources have a significant impact on the physical growth of cities and their vegetation status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]