## 1 Introduction
This is in the aim of the present study, which investigates in detail the DDREs, as well as their effects on the MB temperature structure, cloud regime, and atmospheric dynamics, arising from a specific Dust Aerosol Episode Case (DAEC) that took place from 16 to 18 June 2016 over the central and eastern MB. During this DAEC, mixed-phase clouds, which did not exist a day before (15 June 2016), were formed over the dust export regions [50]. The DA existed in two atmospheric layers, one near the surface, which is more intense near the source areas, and an elevated layer between 2 km and 6 km above sea level. Reduced temperature gradients as well as temperature inversions were also observed below the elevated dust layer. Here, the DDREs are computed with an improved version of the FORTH (Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas) deterministic spectral Radiation Transfer Model (RTM) [51; 52] along with state-of-the-art satellite and reanalysis datasets providing the necessary RTM input data. The estimated SW fluxes are evaluated against reference data, and the computed DDREs are used to interpret the reduced temperature gradients and the formation of temperature inversions during the DAEC found in [50]. Although the DDREs of intense DAECs over the MB have been investigated in previous studies, most of them are spatially limited, since they are based on ground-based measurements [7; 53; 54]. The aerosol DREs over the entire MB were computed for the first time by [55] at a monthly and 2.5\({}^{\circ}\) latitude-longitude resolution using satellite and reanalysis data as input to the FORTH RTM [51; 52]. However, in that study, the calculated DREs refer to the total aerosol effect and not to that of dust alone (DDRE), while they also refer to background aerosol conditions and not to dust episodes. In a step forward in this direction, [8] estimated the DDRE under high-dust-load conditions during 20 Mediterranean DAECs, using the NMMB-MONARCH model. In addition, [45] calculated the DDREs of an episode that took place on February 2015 over the central MB, using the WRF-Chem model. The radiative effect of the same dust episode was also investigated by [56] who conducted a detailed study based on the synergetic use of satellite and ground-based data, as well as model simulations. An important difference of the current study to those by [45; 56] is that the studied episode here took place in summer, when the incoming solar radiation at the MB is maximum, thus maximizing the DDREs. Apart from this, the present study tries to address some issues not covered by the previous two studies, for example, providing information about the vertical profiles of DDREs, while it uses a detailed-spectral-resolution RTM, against the broadband RTM or chemical transport models used in the previous studies, and closely follows-up (on a 3-hourly basis) with a longer (3 days against 2 days in previous studies) intense dust episode in the central and eastern MB. Other additional information provided in the present study is the impact of DDREs on atmospheric dynamics, investigated in detail based on several parameters, namely dust-induced heating rates and resulting vertical velocity and buoyancy. In addition, the comparison of the results of the present to those of few previous studies is useful and necessary to reduce the degree of uncertainty of DDREs. This is important given the still-too-large uncertainty in the radiative forcing due to aerosol-radiation interactions (\(-0.6\) to \(0.0\) W/m\({}^{2}\)), which is partly due to the utilized models, even RTMs [57].