Gigantic Cloud of Dust

[Martin]

Return of The Mummy? | the Daily Mail

These bizarre images show a gigantic cloud of dust billowing over an African city.

The dust storm - known as a "Haboob" - gathered over Khartoum, the capital of Sudan in north east Africa yesterday.

It lasted for about two hours, carrying dust and sand from the Sahara across the city.

Haboobs - which are a type of seasonal storm - are formed in summer months.

They are caused by downdrafts created when a thunderstorm reaches its final phase. These downdrafts cause descending air to hit the ground and pick up large amounts of dust.

The gathering dust clouds then travel forward at a speed of 30 mph, creating the frightening spectacle. The dust storms can reach a height of 3,000 feet and contain a wall of sand up to 60 miles wide.

The word Haboob comes from the Arabic for "phenomena".

The Haboob also occurs in America, especially in hot dry states such as Arizona and Texas.

Verry interesting...

... but do they call a little dust storm a 'haboobie'?

[waltky]

Deserts gonna increase...

UN sounds warning on spread of deserts
September 04, 2007 - THE global spread of deserts poses a severe challenge to humanity that transcends any international borders, a UN-sponsored conference in Madrid heard overnight.

"It's clear now that desertification is amongst the greatest challenges that humankind faces," Crown Prince Felipe, heir to the Spanish throne, said in an opening address to the forum, which included more than 2000 delegates. "We should never forget that the impact of desertification is not only felt in zones where the problem originates, but also in areas much further away," he said.

Over 2000 senior politicians and experts from the 191 nations that have signed the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), adopted in Paris in June 1994, were taking part in the conference. Organisers hope the event will set a new 10 year strategic plan on how to stem desertification that sets measurable objectives as well as a timeline for achieving them.

"This is not a time for complacency. Huge sandstorms, moving sand dunes or raging forest fires are only the spectacular manifestation of a growing threat," said the deputy executive secretary of the UNCCD, Gregoire de Kalbermatten. Around 200 million people live in desert areas while just over two billion - or one-third of the world's population - live on arid land that makes up 41 per cent of the earth's surface, according to a study by the United Nations University.

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[waltky]

Humans contributing to dustiness...

Fivefold increase in dust chokes U.S. West, study finds
WASHINGTON -- Monday, February 25, 2008 - In the 1930s, fierce dust storms created by drought conditions and farming techniques that led to soil erosion swept the prairies of the western United States, causing widespread ecological calamity.

But this so-called Dust Bowl period was just a small example of a huge increase in dustiness in the U.S. West in the past 150 years due to human activities such as settlement, farming and livestock grazing, scientists said on Sunday. The researchers drilled into lake-bed sediments in two small alpine lakes high in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado to measure the amount of dust deposited in the past 5,000 years. Dust blown into these lakes settles to the bottom and accumulates as sediment. Starting in the period from about 1860 to 1900, the dust deposit rates surged at least fivefold over previous levels -- coinciding with a upswing in human activities that kicked up dust into the atmosphere, scientific dating techniques showed.

The researchers said droughts in the past 150 years were not sufficient to explain the increase in dust levels because there had been even worse droughts prior to that period. "We have a lot of dust in the air in the western U.S.," said Jason Neff of the University of Colorado at Boulder, who led the study. "It's a reasonable question to ask -- whether or not that dust is related to human activity. This study pretty clearly shows that a large amount of the dust that's in the atmosphere is related to the legacy of land use and contemporary human uses of the landscape."

Neff's team drilled about 3 feet (1 meter) into the sediment at Porphyry Lake and Senator Beck Lake, both situated about 13,000 feet (4,000 meters) above sea level on a ridgeline between the towns of Telluride and Silverton, Colorado. The study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, is the latest to demonstrate the dramatic impact that people are having on the environment in the western United States. Last month, other scientists reported that human-caused climate change has altered river flows, snow pack and air temperatures, with a water supply crisis looming in the western United States as a result.

Neff said other recent research showed that wind-blown dust cut the duration of San Juan Mountains snow cover by a month, causing an earlier spring snowmelt -- with major implications for agriculture and urban water consumption. The dust spike detected in the new study coincided with a surge in white settlers, the building of railroads and the advent of large-scale ranching and livestock activity. Grazing by millions of cattle on the western rangeland caused systematic degradation of ecosystems, Neff said. Since then, other human activities also have contributed to the dustiness, including agriculture and the development of towns and cities, Neff said in a telephone interview.

Source

[waltky]

Dust storms in Korea...

Killer yellow dust envelops South Korea
March 03, 2008 - SOUTH Korea has closed schools, and factories producing memory chips stepped up safeguards, as a choking pall of sand and toxic dust covers most of the country.

The annual "yellow dust" spring storms, which originate in China's Gobi Desert before enveloping the Korean peninsula and parts of Japan, are blamed for scores of deaths and billions of dollars in damage every year in South Korea. South Korea issued a yellow dust warning at the weekend and today major schools districts in southeastern regions urged parents to keep kindergarten and elementary school children at home.

"We advised the closure because kindergarten, primary school students have weaker immune systems," said Min Eyu-gi, an education official in Busan. An official with the Meteorological Administration said the first major storm of the season, which has also hit parts of Japan, was dissipating.

The sand storms have been growing in frequency and toxicity over the years because of China's rapid economic growth and has added to increased tensions with neighbours South Korea and Japan over recent years. The dust picks up heavy metals and carcinogens such as dioxin as it passes over Chinese industrial regions, before hitting North and South Korea and Japan, meteorologists say.

Dry weather and seasonal winds in China hurl millions of tonnes of sand at the Korean peninsula and Japan from late February until April or May, turning the skies to a jaundiced hue. The state-sponsored Korea Environment Institute said the dust killed up to 165 South Koreans a year, mostly the elderly or those with respiratory ailments, and made as many as 1.8 million ill.

More Killer yellow dust envelops South Korea | NEWS.com.au

See also:

Lunar Eclipse Indicates Climate Change...

Lunar Eclipse May Shed Light on Climate Change
Mar. 3, 2008 - Last month's lunar eclipse not only treated skygazers to a ruddy view of the Moon – it revealed that Earth's atmosphere contains little light-blocking volcanic dust.

Some researchers say the low volcanic dust levels in the atmosphere over the last dozen years could be contributing to global warming, but others dispute the claim. During a lunar eclipse, Earth blocks sunlight from reaching the Moon directly. But some sunlight still gets through, refracted through Earth's atmosphere. The amount varies, depending mainly on how much dust from volcanic eruptions is floating around at high altitudes.

Because dust can block sunlight from passing through the atmosphere, more dust makes for a darker Moon during lunar eclipses. "All the big dimmings of the Moon during eclipses can be attributed to specific volcanoes," says Richard Keen of the University of Colorado in Boulder, US. Keen and his collaborators have charted the brightness of eclipses back to 1960 and for a few years around the time of the 1883 eruption of Indonesia's Krakatoa volcano.

They are using the eclipse data to track changes in the opacity of Earth's atmosphere. While most of the light deflected by particles in the atmosphere is just temporarily diverted and eventually reaches the Earth's surface, the effects of atmospheric dust can have a significant, if temporary, impact on the climate, Keen says.

Global Average

[waltky]

Granny says we all gonna die...

Earth in crisis: NASA's climate scientist
7 Apr 2008, Global warming has plunged the planet into a crisis and the fossil fuel industries are trying to hide the extent of the problem from the public, NASA's top climate scientist says.

"We've already reached the dangerous level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," James Hansen, 67, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, said. "But there are ways to solve the problem" of heat-trapping greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, which Hansen said has reached the "tipping point" of 385 parts per million.

In a paper he was submitting to Science magazine on Monday, Hansen calls for phasing out all coal-fired plants by 2030, taxing their emissions until then, and banning the building of new plants unless they are designed to trap and segregate the carbon dioxide they emit. The major obstacle to saving the planet from its inhabitants is not technology, insisted Hansen, named one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2006 by Time magazine.

"The problem is that 90 per cent of energy is fossil fuels. And that is such a huge business, it has permeated our government," he maintained. "What's become clear to me in the past several years is that both the executive branch and the legislative branch are strongly influenced by special fossil fuel interests," he said, referring to the providers of coal, oil and natural gas and the energy industry that burns them.

In a recent survey of what concerns people, global warming ranked 25th. "The industry is misleading the public and policy makers about the cause of climate change. And that is analogous to what the cigarette manufacturers did. They knew smoking caused cancer, but they hired scientists who said that was not the case." Hansen says that with an administration and legislature that he believes are "well oiled, our best hope is the judicial branch."

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[waltky]

Erosion blowin' all the topsoil away...

Overlooked in the global food crisis: A problem with dirt
Thu May 8, `08 WASHINGTON - Science has provided the souped-up seeds to feed the world, through biotechnology and old-fashioned crossbreeding. Now the problem is the dirt they're planted in.

As seeds get better, much of the world's soil is getting worse and people are going hungry. Scientists say if they can get the world out of the economically triggered global food crisis, better dirt will be at the root of the solution. Soils around the world are deteriorating with about one-fifth of the world's cropland considered degraded in some manner. The poor quality has cut production by about one-sixth, according to a World Resources Institute study. Some scientists consider it a slow-motion disaster.

In sub-Saharan Africa, nearly 1 million square miles of cropland have shown a "consistent significant decline," according to a March 2008 report by a worldwide consortium of agricultural institutions. The cause of the current global food crisis is mostly based on market forces, speculation and hoarding, experts say. But beyond the economics lie droughts and floods, plant diseases and pests, and all too often, poor soil.

A generation ago, through better types of plants, Earth's food production exploded in what was then called the "green revolution." Some people thought the problem of feeding the world was solved and moved on. However, developing these new "magic seeds" was the easy part. The crucial element, fertile soil, was missing. "The first thing to do is to have good soil," said Hans Herren, winner of the World Food Prize. "Even the best seeds can't do anything in sand and gravel."

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[waltky]

Out of Africa...

Could Dust Stop Hurricanes?
May 28, 2008 - Scientist Says Dust From Africa Drifts Over Atlantic, Cooling Ocean

The Atlantic hurricane season starts Saturday, and some scientists will try something new this year to unravel the extremely complex mosaic that creates storms of varying intensities. Is it possible, the scientists are asking, that dust storms in Africa might weaken those Atlantic storms before they reach the eastern seaboard?

For several years now, scientists have had evidence that dust from storms across the vast expanse of the Sahara Desert drifts out over the Atlantic where it reflects some solar radiation back into space, thus cooling the ocean waters that fuel hurricanes. Cooler waters should mean fewer, or less intense, storms, according to recent studies.

Amato Evan of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies is hoping that this year could tell something about the effect of Africa's dust storms on Atlantic hurricanes. His computer model indicates a moderate level of dust storm activity for Africa this year, thus a moderate impact on Atlantic storms. It may take more extreme years to answer the question, but at least this is a start.

More ABC News: Could Dust Stop Hurricanes?