African dust forecast may help hurricane season predictions

Terra Daily: As the official June 1 start of the Atlantic hurricane season approaches, forecasters are developing predictions about the severity of this year's season. For the first time this year, African dust may provide a piece of this puzzle. Researchers in the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) reported earlier this year that African dust storms may dampen hurricanes by cooling sea surface temperature of the tropical Atlantic (visit http://www.news.wisc.edu/14769 for more).

Now CIMSS scientist Amato Evan is extending this work, offering a dust storm activity forecast as a tool to help predict severity of the upcoming hurricane season. Based on patterns of precipitation in Africa during the past year, Evan predicts a moderate level of dust storm activity this summer. "We have a computer model that takes the dust forecast and tries to estimate how much that dust storm activity will cool the ocean," he says. "There is not likely to be an anomalously large warming or cooling [of ocean temperatures] due to dust storm activity."

The dust originates in the Sahara Desert, where windstorms loft particles and carry them west over the Atlantic. High levels of airborne dust reduce the amount of sunlight that reaches the ocean, lowering sea surface temperatures and, generally, hurricane probability….

Dust off the west coast of Africa, NASA, Wikimedia Commons