###### Abstract  
Mineral dust is one of the most important aerosols over the world, affecting health and climate. These mineral particles are mainly emitted over arid areas but may be long-range transported, impacting the local budget of air quality in urban areas. While models were extensively used to study a single specific event, or make a global analysis at coarse resolution, the goal of our study is to simultaneously focus on several affected areas--Europe, North America, Central Asia, east China and the Caribbean area--for a one-month period, March 2014, avoiding any parameter fitting to better simulate a single dust outbreak. The simulation is performed for the first time with the hemispheric version of the CHIMERE model, with a high horizontal resolution (about 10 km). In this study, an overview of several simultaneous dust outbreaks over the Northern Hemisphere is proposed to assess the capability of such modeling tools to predict dust pollution events. A quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the most striking episodes is presented with comparisons to satellite data, ground based particulate matter and calcium measurements. Despite some overestimation of dust concentrations far from emission source areas, the model can simulate the timing of the arrival of dust outbreaks on observational sites. For instance, several spectacular dust storms in the US and China are rather well captured by the models. The high resolution provides a better description and understanding of the orographic effects and the long-range transport of dust plumes. dust; high resolution; particulate matter; modeling; air quality; hemispheric transport 2017 8251 doi:10.3390/atmos8120251 doi:10. Health Organization, in 2012, air pollution was responsible for 7 million premature deaths, 3.7 million deaths from ambient air pollution and 4.3 million deaths from household air pollution [1]. Long-term or short-term exposure to PM\({}_{10}\) and PM\({}_{2.5}\) could trigger hospital visits for asthma in children, as recently shown in China [2]. At the global level, mineral dust is one of the major species affecting the PM background concentrations, interacting with clouds and then on the radiative budget [3; 4] and will also be particularly affected by climate change in the future [5]. The Sahara is certainly the largest source of atmospheric desert dust [6], contributing about 50% of the global total, followed by China and Central Asia (about 20% of the global total), Arabia and Australia. Drylands in Southern Africa and the Americas are relatively minor sources, together accounting for probably less than 5% of the global total. To a lesser extent, large agricultural areas can also contribute to soil PM, a good example is the dust event originated from Ukraine chernozemic soils in 2007 [7]. Health impacts of dust can be illustrated by the case of the Sahel region [8]. This region of West Africa has the highest bacterial meningitis attack and case fatality rates in the world. Mice exposed to the interaction of both heat and dust inhalation have significantly increased risk of invasive pneumococcal disease. It might be that the combination of abrasion of the respiratory tract, impaired phagocytosis, and increased release of damaging pathogen toxins creates a \"perfect storm\" for dissemination of colonized bacteria from the nasopharynx [9; 10]. Moreover, several studies show the impact of natural dust on asthma hospital admissions of affected people [11; 12; 13; 14; 15] and the importance of the mix of dust with anthropogenic pollution [16]. Model simulations suggest that global annual dust emissions have increased by 25% to 50% over the last century due to a combination of land use and climate changes. Sand dust storm frequency and severity have increased in recent decades in some areas but decreased in other areas.