## 4 Summary and Conclusions
From the above-mentioned findings of this study, the most important ones are: (i) during intense spatially extended African dust exports, the SW radiative budget of the Mediterranean basin is significantly perturbed, by at least one order of magnitude than it does in background aerosol loading conditions, reaching hundreds of watts per square meter; (ii) the SW radiative perturbation induces significant radiative cooling at the surface and heating in the atmosphere of the areas affected by the dust export, thus creating temperature gradients with less- or non-affected areas; (iii) the dust-induced radiative cooling/heating along with the warm advection, which takes place during the transport of DAs from the hot desert areas of N. Africa to the MB, modify not only the region's atmospheric temperature structure, but also its stability, resulting in systematic intense temperature inversions and/or reduced temperature lapse rates below the elevated dust layer; this is reported for the first time for the Mediterranean Basin; (iv) yet, the interaction (absorption) of solar radiation with (by) dust is not the main driver for the formation of the atmospheric lapse rate during the DAEC, which may be driven by other mechanisms, such as the advection of heat or thermodynamic processes; (v) the effect of dust transport on buoyancy is investigated/quantified for the first time, showing that dust episodes induce an upward vertical acceleration of air masses, being strongest close to heights with the highest dust loadings, which can partly explain and lead to the generally observed upward motions in and above the dust layers. The current RTM-based study is, to our knowledge, the first to provide such a detailed investigation of the SW DDREs during an intense summer dust episode over the MB. The obtained results complement those obtained in the past from very few other studies that were performed for other periods of the year, but also significantly extend them, providing insights into weather- and climate-relevant issues such as the dust-induced atmospheric heating rates and the produced buoyancy and modifications of vertical air velocity. The model results confirm the significant perturbation of the regional SW radiation budget and the modification of atmospheric temperature fields caused by Mediterranean dust episodes, but also prove that the role of dust DREs in decreased temperature gradients and temperature inversions during such intense dust transport episodes is secondary to other factors such as the advection of heat. In the future, we plan to extend the present study, by also accounting for the dust effect on longwave radiation, which is smaller than the SW effect, but still considerable in the case of dust episodes. Additionally, the results of this study, such as the effects of DAs on temperature profiles, vertical air motions, and cloud formation, are planned to be elucidated in more detail and inter-compared with those obtained by simulations performed with the state-of-the-art WRF-Chem mesoscale model accounting for aerosol-cloud and aerosol-radiation interactions. Finally, a climatology of dust DREs will be created, based on 98 Mediterranean intense dust episodes, similarly to the one studied here, that took place from 2005 to 2019 [50], allowing the generalization of the present findings in terms of possible effects of dust episodes on the regional weather and climate.