Dust aerosols contribute over half of the total atmospheric aerosol mass and play a critical role in climate and environmental processes. Using the observations of 13 AERONET sites and CALIPSO from 2006 to 2021, this study characterizes the optical and vertical properties of dust aerosols over eight main desert regions of the Sahara, Middle East, Thar, Taklamakan, Gobi, North American, Simpson, and Atacama deserts. AERONET observations reveal that the Sahara exhibits the highest annual AOD (0.47) and lowest AE (0.34), while the Atacama and Gobi show the lowest AOD (0.049) and highest AE (1.20), respectively. Most deserts exhibit a seasonal pattern of high AOD and low AE in spring and summer. Aerosols in these deserts are typically unimodal volume size distributions (VSDs) in both fine and coarse modes, while a bimodal distribution in fine mode in the Sahara. Although the peak radius varies little seasonally in most deserts, the concentration increases markedly in spring and summer. The fine mode aerosols have important impact on the aerosol effective radius and concentration in the Gobi and North America desert. CALIPSO identifies four high value centers of dust AOD (DAOD), with the summer maximum over the deserts of Sahara, Middle East, and Thar, and the spring maximum over the deserts of Taklamakan and Gobi. Dust extinction coefficients decay exponentially with the altitudes, showing the slowest vertical decrease in summer and the largest near-surface extinction in spring. Although the single-dust-layer structure dominates in most deserts, the double-dust-layer structure exceed 30 % in the deserts of Sahara, Middle East, Thar, and Taklamakan, with higher occurrence rate in summer and spring and the inter-layer spacing ranging from 0.4 to 0.8 km. Both the dust layer top and base are highest in summer and lowest in winter and the mean layer thickness ranges from 1 to 2.5 km. Significant declining trends are found in dust top heights over the Taklamakan and Gobi, and in layer thickness over the Taklamakan and North America.