Dust devils are important phenomena to take into account to understand the global dust circulation of a planet.
On Earth, their contribution to the injection of dust into the atmosphere seems to be secondary. Elsewhere, there
are many indications that the dust devil’s role on other planets, in particular on Mars, could be fundamental,
impacting the global climate. The ability to identify and study these vortices from the acquired meteorological
measurements assumes a great importance for planetary science.
Here we present a new methodology to identify dust devils from the pressure time series testing the method
on the data acquired during a 2013 field campaign performed in the Tafilalt region (Morocco) of the North-
Western Sahara Desert. Although the analysis of pressure is usually studied in the time domain, we prefer here to
follow a different approach and perform the analysis in a time signal-adapted domain, the relation between the
two being a bilinear transformation, i.e. a tomogram. The tomographic technique has already been successfully
applied in other research fields like those of plasma reflectometry or the neuronal signatures. Here we show its
effectiveness also in the dust devils detection. To test our results, we compare the tomography with a phase
picker time domain analysis. We show the level of agreement between the two methodologies and the advantages and disadvantages of the tomographic approach
