Here Comes the Saharan Dust

If the sky looks a little dusty, here’s the reason why.

[size=83]The Sahara Desert, the Caribbean, and Texas may be several thousand miles apart, but a massive cloud of dust connected these places in late June 2018.

On June 18, satellites began to detect thick plumes of Saharan dust passing over Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau before moving out over the Atlantic Ocean. For the next ten days, the skies over West Africa and across the tropical Atlantic were stained a distinctive shade of yellow as winds pushed pulse after pulse of Saharan dust to the west. According to one preliminary analysis, this brought the tropical Atlantic one of its dustiest weeks in 15 years.

The map above shows dust crossing the Atlantic on June 28, 2018, as represented by the Goddard Earth Observing System Model, Version 5 (GEOS-5). A simulation from GEOS-5 shows plumes of dust from as far away as Iraq and Saudi Arabia blowing across North Africa in mid-June. However, much of the dust that crossed the Atlantic Ocean appeared to be coming from the Bodele depression, a dried lake bed in northeastern Chad.[/size]

If you think that is bad, we are only a couple of hundred km from the Sahara and we get 5-10 severe dust incidents (PM10 and PM2.5) every year, sometimes with visibility down to a hundred metres or so. I’ve had 2 Davis anemometers buggered by dust. One example, with photo, at https://cyprus-mail.com/2018/03/05/high-levels-dust-set-last-till-thursday/ a couple of months ago.

Wow! That’s incredible.

Saharan dust gets much farther north in europe too, this was in the U.K.

reports of purple air sensors in Texas picking it up?

Apparently they are.

Quite a few sensors are showing in the yellow.

According to AirNow.gov, some places in south Texas the AQI is over 100.