West Africa's notorious Harmattan dust storms have long defeated atmospheric electric field monitoring efforts, creating a massive blind spot in global atmospheric electricity research despite the region's critical role as Earth's largest dust source and lightning hotspot. We present a successful methodology for continuous atmospheric electric field measurements in extreme dust environments, deploying a specially adapted Campbell Scientific CS110 electric field mill at Lokoja, Nigeria (7°49'N, 6°44'E) with revolutionary environmental protection, automated cleaning systems, and tropical optimised grounding networks. Traditional fair-weather criteria catastrophically failed, excluding 78% of scientifically valuable data during Harmattan periods when PM₁₀ concentrations exceeded 1000 μg m⁻³ and electric fields reached 5000 V m⁻¹. Our breakthrough region-specific criteria using 4000 m visibility thresholds combined with stability filters achieved a remarkable 94.3% data completeness over 30 months while retaining 46% of measurement days, representing 275% improvement over standard approaches. The validated framework achieved measurement uncertainties of ±3.4% for hourly means, demonstrating that reliable atmospheric electricity monitoring is feasible even under the challenging aerosol conditions. These advances further open unprecedented opportunities for dust storm early warning systems, regional climate modelling, and fundamental understanding of global atmospheric electrical circuits.

Adedokun, J.A., Emofurieta, W.O., & Adedeji, O.A. (1989). Physical, mineralogical and chemical properties of harmattan dust at Ile Ife, Nigeria. Theoretical and Applied Climatology, 40(3), 161- 169. Burns, G.B., Frank-Kamenetsky, A.V., Tinsley, B.A., Rapp, M., Lübken, F.J., & Morfitt, D. (2012). Atmospheric globalcircuit variations from Vostok Antarctic snow conductivity measurements. Journal of Geophysical Research, 117, D11201. Christian, H.J., Blakeslee, R.J., Boccippio, D.J., Boeck, W.L., Buechler, D.E., Driscoll, K.T., Goodman, S.J., Hall, J.M., Koshak, W.J., Mach, D.M., & Stewart, M.F. (2003). Global frequency and distribution of lightning as observed from space by the Optical Transient Detector. Journal of Geophysical Research, 108(D1), 4005. Ette, A.I.I. (1988). The effect of harmattan haze on atmospheric electric parameters in northern Nigeria. Journal of Atmospheric and Terrestrial Physics, 50(2), 89-94. Harrison, R.G. (2002). Twentieth-century atmospheric electrical measurements at the observatories of Kew, Eskdalemuir and Lerwick. Weather, 57(1), 11-16. Harrison,R.G., & Nicoll, K.A. (2018). Fair weather criteria for atmospheric electricity measurements. Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-TerrestrialPhysics,179,239-250. Israelsson, S., & Knudsen, E. (1994). Meteorological effects on atmospheric electrical quantities measure data continental station. Journal of Atmospherican Terrestrial Physics, 56(6), 785- 800. Nicholson, S.E. (2013). The West African Sahel: A review of recent studies on the rainfall regime and its inter annual variability. ISRN Meteorology, 2013, 453521. Prospero, J.M., Ginoux, P., Torres, O., Nicholson, S.E., & Gill, T.E. (2002). Environmental characterisation of global sources of atmospheric soil dust identified with the Nimbus 7 Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) absorbing aerosol product. Reviews of Geophysics, 40(1), 1002. Takagi, S. (1972). On the relationship between the atmospheric electric potential gradient and the ocean current. Journal of the Meteorological Society of B Japan, 50(5), 434-440. Torreson, O.W., Parkinson, W.C., & Torreson, S.L. (1946). Scientific results of Cruise VII of the Carnegie during 1928-1929:Ocean magnetic, electric and meteorological observations. Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication 568. Yaniv, R., Yair, Y., Price, C., Jaffe, E., Arkin, Y., Ziv, B., & Shalev, S. (2017). Ground-based measurements of the vertical E-field in mountainous regions and the "Austausch" effect. Atmospheric Research, 189, 127-133.