Abstract: Dust aerosols have distinct impacts on the energy balance of the land surface by adjusting short wave/long wave radiative processes, and thereby affect the meteorological elements over the near surface. In turn, the impacts are reflected by modifying the heat transfer processes between the land surface and the atmosphere. The semi-arid area is known as the most typical region characterized by the remarkable aridity trend. It is also the region in which sandstorm events occur frequently and is regarded as one of the main sources of sandstorms. The enhanced observational meteorological data, radiative fluxes, and concentration of dust aerosols collected from the Tongyu station, one of the international Coordinated Enhanced Observing Period (CEOP) reference sites in the semi-arid region of China from April to June 2006 are used to investigate the differences of meteorological elements and energy budget in this area under different weather conditions, namely, clear days, light storm days, and sand storm days. The results indicate that in the semi-arid area, dust aerosols have significant influences on the meteorological elements and energy balance of the land surface, which is different from the impacts in the arid areas in some aspects. In the semi-arid area, a higher wind speed is identified in the duststorm period than that in clear days, while atmosphere relative humidity is lower in dust days. The land surface receives less net radiation during the duststorm period, as well as the latent/sensible heat fluxes. The correlationships between aerosol concentration and daily mean sensible heat flux, relative humidity, and latent heat flux are significant. During the daytime, the daily mean air temperature responds to sandstorm more significantly, while 2-cm ground temperature responds more significantly at night. It is meaningful that the sensible heat flux is less during duststorm events in the semi-arid area, which is different from the case in the arid region.