The 1934 drought was worst of the last millennium

A press release from the American Geophysical Union: The 1934 drought was by far the most intense and far-reaching drought of the last 1,000 years in North America, and was caused in part by an atmospheric phenomenon that may have also led to the current drought in California, according to a new study.

New research finds that the extent of the 1934 drought was approximately seven times larger than droughts of comparable intensity that struck North America between 1000 A.D. and 2005, and nearly 30 percent worse than the next most severe drought that struck the continent in 1580.

“We noticed that 1934 really stuck out as not only the worst drou
ght but far outside the normal range of what we see in the record,” said Benjamin Cook, an environmental scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City and lead author of a new paper that has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

The new study also finds that the same atmospheric pattern of a high pressure ridge over the West Coast deflecting away storms laden with rain last winter was also present over the area during the winter of 1933-34.

This ridging pattern has preceded some of the worst West Coast droughts, including the 1976 California drought—the beginning of a two-year dry spell which is widely regarded as one of the most severe droughts in the state’s history. The three-year drought currently crippling California will cost the state $2.2 billion in 2014 alone, and will likely continue through 2015, according to a recent report from the University of California, Davis.

Yet the current drought is nothing, so far, compared to what occurred in 1934, the start of a decade-spanning drought that would come to be known as the Dust Bowl and was one of the worst environmental disasters in the history of the United States.

The drought, which afflicted nearly 72 percent of the western United States, was likely made even worse by atmospheric effects from human-created dust storms, according to the new research. The new study suggests that such interactions between the land and the atmosphere may have an important role to play in drought severity, said Cook, who holds a joint appointment at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory....

Arthur Rothstein's 1936 of a dust storm in the Texas Panhandle

Dust — and the microbes hitching rides on it — influences rain, climate

A press release from the American Chemical Society: Dusty air blowing across the Pacific from Asia and Africa plays a critical role in precipitation patterns throughout the drought-stricken western U.S. Today, a scientist will present new research suggesting that the exact chemical make-up of that dust, including microbes found in it, is the key to how much rain and snow falls from clouds throughout the region. This information could help better predict rain events, as well as explain how air pollution from a variety of sources influences regional climate in general.

...“We’ve learned that not all of the particles in the air at high altitudes have the same influence on clouds. We’re starting to think that these differences contribute to how rain gets distributed,” says Kim Prather, Ph.D.

Most of the dust that Prather’s team at the University of California, San Diego, detects in clouds and precipitation originates in Asian and Chinese deserts. It gets swept westward by the jet stream where it mixes with a variety of other airborne particles such as sea spray and smoke. Prather says that each of these types of particles — collectively known as aerosols — has its own, distinctive impact on clouds.

A major key to what turns ordinary clouds into rainmakers in the first place is their ability to form ice crystals around the microscopic particles that invade and “seed” them, Prather said. Without ice crystals as a catalyst, rain development inside clouds can be impaired.   “The standard belief is the more ice you have in a cloud, the more likely you will get precipitation out of it,” she says. “Our goal is to catch the first stages of ice forming and find out what exactly the chemical constituents are that the ice is forming on.”

...Prather speculates that the microbes hitch a ride on bits of sand, iron and other debris swept aloft from desert regions. Microbes and biological components could also become mixed with the dust as it is transported across the Pacific. She and her team are eager to learn just how important these bioparticles are in the rainmaking process.

...“Long term, our goal is to be able to predict how much precipitation we can expect to form when certain aerosols such as dust are coming toward us,” says Prather. “That’s a lofty goal but we’re making headway.”...

Via NASA, a satellite view of a dust cloud over Asia

Saharan dust lands in England as 'very high' levels of air pollution warned this week

Heather Saul in the Independent (UK): Very high” levels of air pollution over the next few days are prompting health concerns for vulnerable and elderly people, as the dust from the Saharan desert and winds combined to create a potentially "toxic" storm.

Asthmatics have been advised they might need to use their blue reliever inhalers more often as they could be prone to attacks today and over the next few days. Other people with lung and heart problems, and those who are older, should also avoid strenuous exercise or activity.

The advise from Public Health England (PHE), Asthma UK and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) comes as the government warned large swathes of England and Wales will see high levels of pollution on Wednesday.

The east of England and Midlands were the worst-affected areas on Tuesday, Defra said. The elevated pollution levels are the result of a combination of light south-easterly winds, the continental air flow and dust which has blown up from the Sahara desert, a spokeswoman said.

Defra uses a 10-point scale to measure air quality, with a 10 warning suggesting "very high" levels of pollution and a one warning meaning there is a "low risk". Experts are anticipating “high” or “very high” air pollution levels on Wednesday....

A smoggy day in London, 2006, shot by Iain Buchanan, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license 

Wind and dust can predict Sahel meningitis outbreaks

Samuel Mintz at the Thomson Reuters Foundation: Scientists may soon be able to forecast disease outbreaks in sub-Saharan African’s “meningitis belt” using weather data – and use that to plan early vaccination drives to prevent or limit casualties.

In the “meningitis belt” of sub-Saharan Africa, which stretches across the Sahel from Senegal to Ethiopia, major epidemics of lethal meningitis are routine. A devastating 1996-97 outbreak killed about 25,000 people.

An effective new vaccine has driven a decrease in meningitis, but the standard procedure in the region has been to carry out vaccination drives and antibiotic treatment of the disease in districts already suffering outbreaks – and in some cases help arrives too late to make a significant impact, health officials say.

In the near future, though, scientists might be able to use climate factors such as wind and dust conditions to forecast these epidemics and develop earlier vaccination strategies to prevent or limit casualties.

New research carried out in Niger by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University's International Research Institute for Climate and Society found that measured levels of wind and dust can be used to predict some of the annual variability in meningitis outbreaks, at both national and district levels.

 “We’ve known that the disease is associated to climate and environmental issues for a long time, because it’s very seasonal,” said Carlos Perez Garcia-Pando, one of the lead authors of the report. The challenge, he said, to figure out which climate factors were important in order to better equip public health decision makers to act.

“The idea was to try to use models and observations from satellites and all kinds of data on potential (climate-related) parameters that might be affecting the disease, and try to use that information to provide advance warning,” Perez said....

A sandstorm in Chad, shot by Darcy Burbank, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 1.0 Generic license

Climate history written in dust

EurekAlert via the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research: In spring 2010, the research icebreaker Polarstern returned from the South Pacific with a scientific treasure - ocean sediments from a previously almost unexplored part of the South Polar Sea. What looks like an inconspicuous sample of mud to a layman is, to geological history researchers, a valuable archive from which they can reconstruct the climatic history of the polar areas over many years of analysis. This, in turn, is of fundamental importance for understanding global climatic development. With the help of the unique sediment cores from the Southern Ocean, it is now possible to provide complete evidence of how dust has had a major influence on the natural exchange between cold and warm periods in the southern hemisphere. An international research team under the management of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven was able to prove that dust infiltrations there were 2 to 3 times higher during all the ice ages in the last million years than in the warm phases in climatic history.

"High large-area dust supply can have an effect on the climate for two major reasons", explained Dr. Frank Lamy, geoscientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, about the findings. "Trace substances such as iron, which are essential for life, can be incorporated into the ocean through dust. This stimulates biological production and increases the sea's capacity to bind carbon. The result is that the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is taken out of the atmosphere. In the atmosphere itself, dust reflects the sun's radiation and purely due to this it reduces the heat input into the Earth's system. Both effects lead to the fact that the Earth cools down."
...

...The influence of dust supply on the climate changes between ice ages and warm periods has long been suspected. Climatic researchers always found particularly high dust content containing iron when the earth was going through an ice age, both in Antarctic ice cores and in sediment cores from the Atlantic part of the Southern Ocean. However, up to now there was no data available for the Pacific section, which covers 50% of the Southern Ocean. "We can now close this central gap" is how Lamy underlines the importance of the new study. "The result is that we are now finding the same patterns in the South Pacific that we found in cores from the South Atlantic and the Antarctic ice. Therefore, the increased dust input was a phenomenon affecting the southern hemisphere during colder periods. This means that they now have to be considered differently when assessing the complex mechanisms which control natural climate changes."

..."Our investigations have now proved without a doubt that colder periods in the southern hemisphere over a period of 1 million years always and almost everywhere coincided, , with lower carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere and higher dust supply from the air. The climatic history of the Earth was, therefore, written in dust." ...

NASA image of dust over southeast Australia

First evidence that dust and sand deposits in China are controlled by rivers

Space Daily via SPX: New research published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews has found the first evidence that large rivers control desert sands and dust in Northern China.

Northern China holds some of the world's most significant wind-blown dust deposits, known as loess. The origin of this loess-forming dust and its relationship to sand has previously been the subject of considerable debate.

The team of researchers led by Royal Holloway University, analysed individual grains of fine wind-blown dust deposited in the Chinese Loess Plateau that has formed thick deposits over the past 2.5 million years.

As part of this, they also analysed the Mu Us desert in Inner Mongolia and the Yellow River, one of the world's longest rivers, to identify links between the dust deposits and nearby deserts and rivers.

The results showed that the Yellow River transports large quantities of sediment from northern Tibet to the Mu Us desert and further suggests that the river contributes a significant volume of material to the Loess Plateau....

The Gobi Desert, Inner Mongolia, shot by Svdmolen, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

African dust storms traveling far

A press release from the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science: You might find it hard to believe that dust clouds from the African Sahara can travel thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean, but it does every year and in large quantities. In a recent study, Joseph Prospero, professor emeritus at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and collaborators at the University of Houston and Arizona State University found that the average air concentrations of inhalable particles more than doubled during a major Saharan dust intrusion in Houston, Texas.

The researchers were able to distinguish between particles transported across the Atlantic and those from local sources in the Houston region. In this way they established the “fingerprint” of the African dust. To their knowledge, this is the first study that isolates, differentiates, and quantifies the air contaminants in the US during the incursion of African dust. There is a concern that the fine airborne dust particles could be a health problem for asthmatics and people with respiratory problems.

Current EPA air quality standards are based on the total amount of particles that are in the air,” Prospero says. “Our study will contribute to our ability to discriminate and identify the dominant components in the air during long-range transport events,” he says. “Our hope is that our work is instrumental in assisting regulatory agencies respond to health and environmental issues linked to African dust.”

The findings published in the journal of Environmental Science and Technology can also serve to address African dust intrusion in other affected regions of the world. For instance, the Caribbean Basin receives enormous quantities of African dust every year.  In addition to its impact on air quality, an important factor for the Caribbean basin is the potential effect of Saharan air outbreaks on hurricane activity.       

African dust storms are associated with hurricane season because the meteorological situations that are involved with generating tropical cyclones are also associated with the generation and transport of dust,” Prospero says. “The dust emerges from the coast of Africa in a hot, dry, elevated layer – the Saharan Air Layer (SAL) following behind Easterly Waves from which tropical cyclones sometimes develop,” he says. “The SAL interacts with the waves in complex way, so that the relationship is not entirely clear. It is the subject of much ongoing research.”...

African dust storm, image by NASA

Insight into Saharan dust migration

Terra Daily via SPX:  Satellite pictures of Saharan dust clouds have been in the news all summer, but to Shankar Chellam, they have just raised more questions. How much impact did the Saharan dust have on Houston's air? Is it more toxic than our home-grown dust?

...Clouds of African dust often migrate across the Atlantic Ocean during summer months, affecting Houston's air quality from mid-June through mid-September. Chellam said it's especially prevalent in late August and early September. The dust, whipped up by sandstorms in northwest Africa and carried by trade winds across the Atlantic Ocean, takes about 10 days to two weeks to reach the United States and, ultimately, Houston.

...Chellam became interested after he noticed "the most curious coincidence" as he was collecting data on industrial air pollution outside plants along the Houston Ship Channel in 2008. He began the project expecting that the plants would emit a constant amount of pollution, as measured from just beyond their property lines. But he discovered that on some days they emitted relatively little, while emissions were much higher on other days.

"What we quickly realized was that the impact of the refineries varied with time," he said. "We naively had gone into our research expecting that if we took three months of data, we would get an average." A five-day period in July and August 2008 showed a large variation. That coincided with an influx of Saharan dust, Chellam said.

To determine the actual impact of the Saharan dust required scientific detective work. Chellam and his team determined the "fingerprint" of the African dust, allowing them to differentiate it from other types of pollutants in their samples: industrial dust, vehicle pollutants and smoke from wildfires, among other things....

Dust from the Sahara blowing over the Atlantic Ocean. Image from NASA

NASA mission analyzes Saharan dust layer over eastern Atlantic

NASA: One of two of NASA's Global Hawk unmanned aircraft flew over the remnants of Tropical Storm Erin and investigated the Saharan Air Layer in the Eastern Atlantic Ocean on Aug. 20 and 21. The instruments aboard the Global Hawk sampled the environment of ex-Erin and revealed an elevated dust layer overrunning the storm.

"Our goal with this flight was to look at how the Saharan air would move around or into the former storm, but the circulation was so shallow and weak that, according to our instruments, the Saharan air simply moved westward right over what was left of Erin," said Scott A. Braun, HS3 principal investigator and a research meteorologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Two Global Hawks are flying as part of HS3, short for NASA's Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel mission, this year out of NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility at Wallops Island, Va. Global Hawk aircraft are well-suited for hurricane investigations because they can fly for as long as 28 hours and over-fly hurricanes at altitudes greater than 60,000 feet (18.3 km).

One of the purposes of the HS3 mission is to address the controversial role of the Saharan Air Layer in tropical storm formation and intensification. On its first flight out of Wallops, a Global Hawk obtained data about the SAL using several instruments aboard.

The Cloud Physics Lidar, or CPL, instrument analyzed the SAL and showed an elevated dust layer between about 1.5 and 2.8 miles (2.5 and 4.5 km) overrunning the remnants of Erin. The low-level clouds associated with what was left of Erin were located below 1.2 miles (2 km). The CPL is an airborne lidar system designed specifically for studying clouds and aerosols. CPL will study cloud- and dust-layer boundaries and will provide optical depth or thickness of aerosols and clouds....

This infrared image from NOAA's GOES-East satellite on Aug. 20 shows the Global Hawk crossing the low-level remnants of Erin. Erin's low-level clouds appear as a faint circulation. The green path is the direction the Global Hawk came from. The red line represents the path the aircraft would follow.
Image Credit: NASA/NOAA

NASA's 2013 HS3 hurricane mission to delve into Saharan dust

NASA: NASA's 2013 Hurricane and Severe Storms Sentinel or HS3 mission will investigate whether Saharan dust and its associated warm and dry air, known as the Saharan Air Layer or SAL, favors or suppresses the development of tropical cyclones in the Atlantic Ocean. The effects of Saharan dust on tropical cyclones is a controversial area of science. During the 2012 campaign, NASA's Global Hawk unmanned aircraft gathered valuable data on the dust layer that swirled around Tropical Storm Nadine for several days.

The Saharan dust layer is composed of sand and other mineral particles that are swept up in air currents and whisked westward over the Atlantic Ocean. The extreme daytime heating of the Sahara creates instability in the lowest layer of the atmosphere, warming and drying the air near the surface and cooling and moistening the air near the top of the dust layer near 5 kilometers (16,500 feet). Once it exits the African coast, the dust-laden air moves over air that is cooler, and moister, and it's the temperature inversion of warm air over cold that prevents deep cloud development. This suppression of deep cloud formation along with the dry air within the dust layer is reasons why this Saharan air layer is sometimes thought to suppress tropical cyclone development. On the other hand, the southern boundary of this hot desert air essentially acts like a front whose attendant wind patterns are a major source of the African waves that are precursors to storm formation.

HS3 addresses the controversial role of the Saharan Air Layer, or SAL, in tropical storm formation and intensification by taking measurements from three instruments on board the Global Hawk. These instruments include a cloud physics lidar which uses a laser to measure vertical profiles of dust; a dropsonde system that releases small instrumented packages from the aircraft that fall to the surface while measuring profiles of temperature, humidity, and winds; and an infrared sounder that measures temperature and humidity in clear-sky regions.

...The dust data collected by the Global Hawk is important for scientific studies on the SAL. Other data was useful operationally to the National Hurricane Center (NHC), the entity that issues forecasts for tropical cyclones. The forecasters at the NHC used data from dropsondes released from the Global Hawk in the discussion of Nadine at 11 a.m. EDT on Sept. 20, "The current intensity is kept at 45 knots (51.7 mph/83.3 kmh)…is in good agreement with dropsonde data from the NASA global hawk aircraft and AMSU [satellite instrument] estimates."...

The Global Hawk's flight pattern, from NASA

Dust storm accelerates snowmelt in Idaho mountains

KTVU.com: A wind storm earlier this month covered a southwestern Idaho mountain range with dust from Oregon and Nevada and accelerated snowmelt due to the darker surface absorbing heat from the sun as opposed to being reflected by pristine white snow, scientists say.

The Idaho Statesman reports that experts said the March 6 storm with winds averaging 34 mph and gusts up to 57 mph put a dust layer on the northern Owyhee Mountains. Hydrologists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture said observations in the region found accelerated melting from March 10 to March 16, with the Owyhee River runoff peaking a week earlier than normal.

"Nobody on our staff has ever witnessed anything similar," said research hydrologist Adam Winstral. Snow surveyors with the Natural Resources Conservation Service said the dust reached as far east as the upper Mores Creek watershed near Idaho City in south-central Idaho.

"Because it's been so dry in the valleys in Oregon and Nevada, the wind picked the dust up and carried it here," said Ron Abramovich, a water supply specialist with the Idaho Natural Resources Conservation Service. Abramovich said workers removed 3-inch core samples of snow that, when melted, left a half-inch plug of dust. "That's just one spot," Abramovich said. "When you spread this much dust over the watershed, you know there are impacts."....

Galena summit near Sun Valley, Idaho, shot by Stephen Marks, public domain

Dust Bowl reflections-- a Carbon Based original

One way to address climate change today is to fully appreciate yesterday's climate disasters. The recent broadcast of Ken Burns' documentary on the Dust Bowl is a starting point, if an often annoying one. Plaintive violins and banjos keep the nostalgia turned up high.  The personality-focused style of these shows often blunts general insights and muffle the sharp points that need to be kept in mind.   But at least the talking heads in "The Dust Bowl" were explicit in stating that the catastrophe was manmade, like today's climate change woes.

The story is a familiar blend of fragile prospertiy, delusional hope and harsh comeuppance. The Homestead Act after the Civil War lured growing numbers of farmers onto semiarid grasslands, with few trees and little water.  A period of higher than normal rainfall masked the consequences of this influx for a while.  Many Plains dwellers believed that the wetter weather was permanent. 

Policy choices played a destructive role in adding to the risks. "Rain follows the plow" was the dunderheaded motto used to promote the settlement.  Free or cheap land and price supports for wheat during World War I led to good years that attracted more immigrants. By this time, most residents were deeply attached to the land.

During these fat years, deep plowing destroyed the millions of acres of grasses that held the soil in place, and brought marginal land under cultivation. Fields were often left bare, without cover cropping despite the constant winds.  Topsoils dried up even before the drought returned, which was the prelude to the apocalyptic dust storms of the 1930s.

When the rain stopped and the dust storms came, most people in the area underestimated the dangers.  They said, "We've seen droughts before, we've seen dust storms before," even though the storms of the 1930s were larger and longer lasting. Moving away seemed unthinkable.   As the market for wheat collapsed and the drought worsened, most farmers were loath to see their own part in fomenting the disaster.  Just leave us alone, they said, and the rains will come back, and things will return to normal. 

But the drought got worse. One farmer lamented, "One of those years, we put our entire wheat crop in one wagon."  Children and the elderly sickened and died from "dust pneumonia."

The exodus from the Dust Bowl eventually picked up after more than five years of no money and no crops.  "A migration of the defeated," the narrator intoned, it dwarfed the 19th century US migrations, but it's largely gone from public notice. 

Several of witnesses summoned by Burns showed some insight into the problem. Bernard Lewis, a child at the time, said, "We always had hope that next year was going to be better... we learned slowly." These hopes were cruelly shredded in the years of depression and dust, only to return in a blink when conditions improved.

In the last few minutes of part two of the "The Dust Bowl," various interviewees acknowledged the need for humility and for staying mindful of the land's limits and needs.  But the script did little to explain the predictable market failures that  worsened tolerable natural cycles into outright catastrophe.

The government's response was a mixed bag. Short-term, the Works Progress Administration in 1935 launched projects that, though they were condemned as make work, nevertheless brought labor to the region and helped busted farmers. More scientific agriculture was brought to bear on the problem, with contour plowing and better erosion control replacing destructive land use habits of yore.  But the improvements were modest, and the government did little to slow down the the reintroduction of the same detrimental practices once the rains returned.   In the 1940s, overplanting and developing marginal land resumed quickly. Smaller dust storms returned in the 1950s, held somewhat in check by the new methods.

Roosevelt may have brought hope to the region, but the political calculus left no room for the most sustainable measure in the long term -- leave the land alone, and avoid development where there isn't the water to support it.  We see a similar pattern happening today in the planting of crops for biofuel, and in the Great Plains today, in pumping ancient groundwater from the Ogallala Aquifer. One of the speakers estimates that only twenty years of water remain -- and then it's back to the drought cycle.

After the Dot Com bust after 2000, the Onion ran a headline:  "Americans angrily demand new bubble to invest in."   Maybe it's human nature. But it's worth resisting. The bad ecological outcomes of climate change that threaten us today are potentially much worse than the Dust Bowl.

FSA; Dust Storm; "Farmer and sons walking in the face of a dust storm"; Cimarron County, Oklahoma. Shot by Arthur Rothstein in 1936. This image gets a few minutes of its own in the Ken Burns documentary

New study links dust to increased glacier melting, ocean productivity

The Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science: A University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science-led study shows a link between large dust storms on Iceland and glacial melting. The dust is both accelerating glacial melting and contributing important nutrients to the surrounding North Atlantic Ocean. The results provide new insights on the role of dust in climate change and high-latitude ocean ecosystems.

UM Rosenstiel School Professor Joseph M. Prospero and colleagues Joanna E. Bullard and Richard Hodgkins (Loughborough University, U.K.) analyzed six years of dust concentrations collected at the Stórhöfoi research station on the island of Heimaey, which is located 17 km (10.5 mi) off the south coast of Iceland. The results show large increases in dust concentration, which can be traced to dust sources adjacent to major glaciers on Iceland.

As the glaciers melt, rivers of black, volcanic-rich sediments flow into the surrounding land and nearby ocean. Intense windstorms, common in the high-latitudes, eventually sweep up the dried sediments. The resulting dust storms are clearly visible in satellite images that show huge dust plumes extending hundreds of kilometers south over the Atlantic Ocean. Iceland glaciers are melting at a high rate due to global warming and to sub-glacial volcanic activity.

“The dust in Iceland dust storms can also have an impact on the glaciers themselves,” said Prospero, UM Rosenstiel professor emeritus and lead author on the study. “The black dust deposited on the glacier surface absorbs solar radiation thereby increasing the rates of glacial melting.”

Iceland dust can also affect ocean processes over the North Atlantic. The researchers suggest that the iron-rich dust provides a late summer/early fall nutrient boost to the typically iron-depleted North Atlantic Ocean waters. The iron increases the ocean’s primary productivity and stimulates the growth of marine biota. This, in turn, increases the draw down of CO2 from the atmosphere to the ocean....

The photographer, Ysangkok, says: Can't really remember what glacier it was, maybe it was Vatnajökull. Public domain

Massive dust storm shows importance of federal, state conservation programs

Southwest Farm Press (US): A dust storm reminiscent of those which plagued the Southern Plains of the United States during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s that struck Lubbock, Texas, this week should serve as a reminder of the importance of state and federal conservation programs according to Joe Parker, president of the Oklahoma Association of Conservation Districts (OACD).

“The massive dust storm that hit Lubbock, Texas, on October 17 ironically happened on the same day that the leaders of the U.S. House and Senate Agriculture Committees announced their willingness to reduce federal Farm Bill Programs, including Conservation programs, by over $23 billion as part of the effort to balance the federal budget,” Parker said. “While it’s true we all need to do our part to help put our fiscal house in order, this storm should show why these cuts can’t all come from conservation and why it’s important that we keep a focus on natural resource protection on working farm and ranch land unless we want to see a new Dust Bowl.”

On October 17, a massive dust storm started in the far southwest Texas Panhandle along the edge of a cold front that moved south toward Lubbock at approximately 55 mph. The storm reached Lubbock at 5:30 p.m. and took roughly 30 minutes to blow through the city. At the height of the storm, visibility ranged from a quarter-mile to near-zero for 40 minutes at Lubbock Preston Smith International Airport. Reports from the National Weather Service said winds gusts as high as 60 to 65 miles per hour were recorded.

According to OACD’s Executive Director Clay Pope, this storm should send a message to policy makers and agriculture producers alike—we have to stay focused on working lands conservation. “Whether its policy makers ensuring that conservation programs are available and funded or farmers and ranchers practicing good stewardship on their land, we all have to remember the importance of natural resource conservation,” Pope said. “Earlier this spring we started telling producers to be careful about how they farmed this summer and for the most part, we have maintained the strong conservation track record that goes all the way back to the 1930s."...

From June 2009, a gust-front dust cloud, called a Haboob, moving across the Llano Estacado toward Yellow House Canyon near the residential community of Ransom Canyon, Texas, shot by Leaflet

Dust storms in Arizona

Carly M. Price, Morgan Sailor and Angela Piazza in the Arizona Republic: A massive wall of dust struck the Valley on Thursday night, but microbursts throughout the area wreaked the most havoc. The scattered microbursts reached winds of up to 60 mph and knocked over trees and power poles that left 1,500 customers across the Valley without power and another 3,100 around Eloy and Casa Grande during the storm's peak.

The Eloy area was one of the earliest and hardest hit by the storm, with 25 to 30 power poles knocked over. Trees falling on power lines also caused power outages. The damaging winds collapsed walls and tore off the roofs of buildings. Shingles from roofs of houses in the San Tan Valley area were also ripped off. The punishing storms caused sporadic outages throughout the area.

Of the 1,500 Valley customers without power, 1,100 of those were in Peoria. As of this morning, only two customers did not have service restored in this area. Although the Eloy and Casa Grande areas were the hardest hit, APS Spokesman Dan Wool expects the remaining customers to be basking in their air-conditioning and drinking ice-cold water by noon.

Currently, 90 customers Valley-wide are sweating the effects of powerless homes, but only 30 of those are storm-related, SRP Spokesman Jeff Lane said. The remaining homes were undergoing routine, scheduled outages. "Crews worked overnight, and as of 7 (this morning), only 15 were without power," Wool said about the Eloy area....

A dust storm blowing into Ahwatukee, Phoenix, Arizona on 22 August 2003.Shot by Junebug172, Wikimedia Commons

An editorial in the Salt Lake Tribune raises the danger the American west has largely forgotten – erosion and dust: It was called “The worst hard time

An editorial in the Salt Lake Tribune raises the danger the American west has largely forgotten – erosion and dust: It was called “The worst hard time.” The Dust Bowl, when millions of square miles of formerly productive earth literally dried up and blew away, and took the hopes and fortunes of much of America right along with it.

There were many reasons for the disaster, a perfect dust storm of causes natural (eight years of drought) and human (plowing up the Great Plains). The result was a depopulation of large swaths of America’s midsection that have never recovered, mass migrations and social upheavals, and, to our credit, improved farming methods that take some care to keep the soil where it belongs. And it could very well happen all over again. This time, in Utah. And, when it does, it will be even more our fault than it was the last time. Because now, supposedly, we know better.

Experts at the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of California-Los Angeles have released a report showing that the Southwestern United States is on the brink of another kind of dust bowl. Again, it will be a result of many factors, including that the process begins with a climate that is generally pretty darn dry to begin with and is exacerbated by global climate change and local disregard for the sensitivity of our soils…

Farmer and sons walking in the face of a dust storm. Cimarron County, Oklahoma, in 1936

Dust from Africa may increase risk of seafood poisoning

Richard Gray in the Telegraph (UK): Researchers have found that harmful bacteria found in seawater flourish in the presence of dust that comes from the Sahara desert in western Africa, as well as other areas of continent. They warn that as climate change causes such desert areas to grow, the risk of seafood poisoning could rise around the world.

At the same time, rising sea temperatures could further increase the chances of these bacteria occurring in shellfish caught in British waters. Huge quantities of the dust can be carried long distances across the sea by the trade winds. Although much of it is deposited in the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico and the Mediterranean, some reaches northern Europe and the UK, where it can sometimes be found forming a thin layer on car windscreens.

Dr Erin Lipp, from the University of Georgia, said that species of harmful bacteria including Vibrio parahaemolyticus, Vibrio alginolyticus, Vibrio vulnificus and even cholera showed significant growth spurts two days after African desert dust was added to the water they grew in. She said: "We focused on desert areas in western Africa that are likely to grow over the coming century due to climate change. Dust storms in these areas are also projected to increase and with them, the transport of dust across the Atlantic Ocean basin."
Dr Lipp, who presented the findings at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Washington on Saturday, added: "Our results suggest that in addition to rising sea surface temperatures, increased global production and oceanic deposition of desert dust may have a significant affect on key marine pathogens and may ultimately increase exposure rates and infection risk in humans. "We saw a 10 to 1,000-fold growth in Vibrios, including one strain that could cause eye, ear, and open wound infections, and another strain that could cause cholera."

Desert dust can lead to huge booms in sea life as it helps to nourish the water but the new findings could also now be used to help predict when shellfish from different regions are most at risk of causing food poisoning outbreaks…

A dust plume off the coast of West Africa

Sand storms in Mideast 'damaging people's health'

Trade Arabia Business News Information: Dust and sand storms in Bahrain and the region risk damaging people's health and could lead to climate change, an expert has warned. Dust and sand particles hanging in the air for long periods of time prevent the sun's rays from reaching the ground, leading to colder than usual weather, said Geneva-based World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) research department scientific officer Slobodan Nickovic.

'Gradually, this can lead to the weather patterns changing,' he told our sister newspaper Gulf Daily News (GDN). Speaking on the sidelines of an international symposium on sand and dust storms in the Arab region, he said while it is impossible to prevent such conditions given the huge desert areas in the region, one could predict them better and manage the situation in advance.

'Though climate change is an important side effect, people's health being affected is a major issue if these dust storms are not managed properly,' said Nickovic. He said a number of studies on climate change found ground temperatures can drop up to 6C if dust blankets the atmosphere….

A sand storm over Erfoud, Morocco, shot by Galilea for German Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Earth is twice as dusty as in 19th century

Lauren Gold in Cornell University Chronicle: … The amount of dust in the Earth's atmosphere has doubled over the last century, according to a new study; and the dramatic increase is influencing climate and ecology around the world. The study, led by Natalie Mahowald, associate professor of earth and atmospheric sciences, used available data and computer modeling to estimate the amount of desert dust, or soil particles in the atmosphere, throughout the 20th century. It's the first study to trace the fluctuation of a natural (not human-caused) aerosol around the globe over the course of a century.

….Desert dust and climate influence each other directly and indirectly through a host of intertwined systems. Dust limits the amount of solar radiation that reaches the Earth, for example, a factor that could mask the warming effects of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. It also can influence clouds and precipitation, leading to droughts; which, in turn, leads to desertification and more dust. Ocean chemistry is also intricately involved. Dust is a major source of iron, which is vital for plankton and other organisms that draw carbon out of the atmosphere.

…Among their results, the researchers found that regional changes in temperature and precipitation caused a global reduction in terrestrial carbon uptake of 6 parts per million (ppm) over the 20th century. The model also showed that dust deposited in oceans increased carbon uptake from the atmosphere by 6 percent, or 4 ppm, over the same time period.

While the majority of research related to aerosol impacts on climate is focused on anthropogenic aerosols (those directly emitted by humans through combustion), Mahowald said, the study highlights the important role of natural aerosols as well. "Now we finally have some information on how the desert dust is fluctuating. This has a really big impact for the understanding of climate sensitivity," she said….

Graphic from the Cornell website

A dustier Tibet?

Eli Kintisch in New Scientist: Sediments taken from the bottom of a lake on the Tibetan Plateau suggest that changes in wind patterns caused by global warming may be making the area dustier. That trend could accelerate the melting of crucial glaciers in the Himalayas and affect already imperiled water supplies.

Jessica Conroy, a graduate student in paleoclimatology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and colleagues collected sediment cores from the bottom of Kiang Lake in southwestern Tibet using equipment suspended from rafts. The cores track the history of climate in the region back to 1050 C.E. According to Conroy, who presented the data here at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union on 15 December, the amount of fine-grained dust in the lake sediment increased over the 20th century. Finer dust arrives from distant desert regions hundreds of kilometers away, suggesting stronger winds with the power to deliver the material.

Scientists have previously noted the rise of dust in the region but attributed it to the increase in agriculture, grazing, and other relatively local developments. Data Conroy presented showed that dusty periods coincide with summers when a Northern Hemisphere atmospheric phenomenon called the Arctic Oscillation is in a "positive phase." A positive phase of this pattern in the summer leads to stronger winds in desert areas to the north of the lake as well as south of the Himalayas….

Kiang Lake in 1938, from the Bundesarchiv