The State Association of Meteorology (AEMET) and the National Supercomputing Center in Barcelona signed an agreement on April 26th for Barcelona to host the new center.

Atmospheric dust and sand represent an important risk factor for both the environment and health, as well as being a negative factor for sectors such as agriculture and air transport. On the other hand, they play an important role in the transport of nutrient minerals, which favors the development of marine ecosystems and fishing. Further, climatologists are convinced that dust and sand represent a key factor toward understanding climate change.

The Center in Barcelona will centralize and process data gathered from ground stations as well as satellites, in addition to being a focal point for the data generated by predictive numeric models. Once processed, this data will permit researchers to make more precise and long-term forecasts about the atmospheric content of dust and sand.

The work carried out in the Barcelona Center will permit an improved evaluation of European air quality levels. That said, this information is especially important for the African countries of the Sahara and the Sahel regions, where dust and sandstorms represent a serious health problem as well as a major impediment in the development of some economic sectors. From this standpoint, the Center will collaborate with various programs of the World Health Organization and in particular MERIT, a project aimed at reducing the harm caused by meningitis in sub-Saharan Africa each year.

With the signing of this accord, Barcelona becomes one of the two headquarters–the other is Beijing, where another such forecasting center is already operating–of the project developed by the World Meteorological Organization to continually monitor and predict the amount of sand and dust in the atmosphere.