Revisited: Q&A - Saharan Dust & Hurricanes

Revisited: Q&A - Saharan Dust & Hurricanes

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Yeah. Today's Q and A the relationship between Saharan dust
and hurricane season. This is brought to you by my
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(00:23):
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(00:43):
topic question for a future at Q and I. Today's
note is this at Bria modradio is the reason hurricane
season is off to slow start. The Saharan dust. You
were on it last year, all right, So let's take
a look at this. Speaking of the Saharan.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
Dust, Florida's guys have been muddied by dust. As a
massive plume of Saharan dust tracks across the southeast and
Gulf coast. The fine particles still aloft after the five
thousand mile journey across the Atlantic.

Speaker 1 (01:09):
So yeah, there are some similarities as we have had,
just as we did early last hurricane season, a lot
of sharan dust making its way here. The one thing
that it's different this year is we still haven't had
any tropical formation taking place, which will take all day long.
And so yeah, the saharan dust, it is drying. The
weather oult does spring with it, a lot of sun

(01:31):
with the side of particulate matter. Anytime you look into it,
you can see the haze almost kind of dusty look.
So yeah, saharan dust is the ultimate hurricane repellent. And yes,
the two are connected. And there have been a few
times over the past year that I've discussed this topic,
and I continue to get a lot of questions around this,
actually a lot of things pretending to hurricane forecasting hurricane season,

(01:54):
and I'm happy to address them. Take a look at
the importance of saharan dust and influencing the Atlantic hurricane season.
If there's anything we've learned in recent years, it's that
it's been understated. It was three years ago that I
began extensively covering the topic and rather than kind of
reinventing the wheel, here's the crux of my original story

(02:18):
on this climate change in a quiet, alantic hurricane season.
As I said in that story, at the forefront of
active hurricane predictions has been the topic of climate change
in specifically warmer temperatures and especially warmer oceans resulting in
an increasingly active hurricane season. It's logical because it is
the fact that warmer waters are more conducive for tropical development,

(02:40):
hence why hurricane season happens when it does. But there's
a big oldfly and the climate change equals ever more
hurricanes argument. It is not analytical, and it's been on
my radar for over a couple of years. Mentioned you
might have noticed we seemingly have had more saherent dust
clouds flying over South Florida and it hasn't been your imagination.

(03:03):
And as I've been researching, it was because my wife,
Ashley has asthma and the increasing Saharan dust activity meant
that she had a change in hailer's use them more
often frequently ended up popping zertech and as part of
my research into the Saharan dust came across a Harvard
study in twenty twenty entitled climate change affects Saharan dust

(03:26):
storms and the lead line set it all. A new
groundbreaking study shows that the warming planet will make dust
storms more intense than the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. And
without diving into all the specs of the study, the
bottom line was this. The past couple of years, we
have seen a marked increase in Saharan dust clouds, and
Harvard's researchers offer extensive evidence that a rising temperatures climate

(03:51):
change is behind it. So a few things act as
a greater hurricane repellent than massive dust clouds across the
entire Atlantic sometimes cross over into the Gulf. So two
years ago, when we swung into the El Nina weather
pattern during hurricane season, Saharan dust wasn't as prominent of
a factor because the dust often just was not making

(04:12):
its way all the way here. The last year, as
we shifted back to the La Ninia weather pattern, the
dust steadily flowed from coast to coast Africa to the Americas,
almost like it was on a conveyor belt. For a while,
the dust was historically high in June and as a
result there were only three named storms through the first
two months of hurricane season last year, and what had
been predicted by many to be a historically busy not

(04:35):
just above average, but a historically busy and perhaps even
record setting season in the end, the season concluded with
only and I say only in quotations, but only above
average activity. So the Saharan earlier, which generally moves between
five thousand and fifteen thousand feet above sea level, contains

(04:56):
an average of fifty percent less moisture. Like if you're
taking a look your average to the Hearan dust cloud,
what does this actually mean? Fifty percent less moisture, And
so that doesn't necessarily line up with fifty percent less
tropical development. It can be more complicated than that, like,
for example, all of the rain that we had recently,
even with Saharan dust as it was making its way

(05:18):
into the state. But it certainly reduces whatever else would
be present. And the other potential benefit of the dust
is the ability to ever so slightly impact ocean temperatures.
The dust reflects some of the sunlight and reflect small
amounts of solar radiation that can lead to slightly cooler
ocean temperatures than otherwise would be so. Last year there

(05:42):
was another meaningful development on the topic, a new study
entitled leading Role of Saharan dust on tropical cycle and
rainfall in the Atlantic Basin. It's published in Science Adventures
and highlighted by Stanford University, and among the study conclusions
was this surprisingly the leading and this is the way
they framed it. They said, surprisingly the leading factor or

(06:05):
controlling hurricane precipitation is not as traditionally thought, sea surface
temperature or humidity in the atmosphere. Instead, it's sahara dust. So,
without getting into the weeds of the research, the main
takeaways for these Saharan dust has become the single biggest
factor in whether tropical formation takes place and how much

(06:28):
rain is concentrated in the storms the do form. So
in that note, Saharan dust is a pest for people
with respiratory conditions like my wife Ashley, but it is
our best friend when it comes to hurricane season, and
Ashley has said that she'll gladly take a little extra
and hailer used for the absence of hurricanes's good trade off.

(06:49):
She definitely has it a lot worse than me, but
I do. I had burning eyes yesterday early yesterday, and
I'm pretty sure it was the Saharan dust. You have
probably sensitivity to it. I think most people would take
the trade off most of the last week's stuff. Dust Point,
by the way, is run its core. So there is
another slightly less dense round making its way in the
Eastern Atlantic right now