dust storm essay

• ENVIRONMENT

Are dust storms getting worse? Here’s why they’re so destructive.

We’ve known how to mitigate them for nearly a century, but these storms will likely grow in intensity as farming expands and climate change intensifies.

The May sun hadn’t yet risen over Interstate 55 in central Illinois when wind began to blow from the west, sending a coating of dry soil on nearby fields billowing into the sky—and reducing visibility to near-zero for vehicles speeding along the highway. Dozens of cars crashed. Illinois State Police later said 37 people were hospitalized, and at least seven died.

The tragedy illustrates a wider problem. Dust storms have killed hundreds in the U.S. over the last decade, a death rate similar to those of hurricanes, wildfires and tornadoes. Those casualties are likely to increase as climate change intensifies.

( What are hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones ?)

We’ve known how to prevent these storms for decades, but help isn’t getting into the hands of farmers that need it. Here’s what you need to know about dust and sand storms, and what to do if you’re caught in one.

What are dust and sandstorms?  

Dust storms typically occur when strong winds sweep across dry areas without plant cover, explains Natalie Mahowald, a professor of atmospheric science at Cornell University. As the wind strafes the earth, it breaks up the layer of dust on top of the soil and lifts the light, tiny dust particles into the air. Eventually, the dust and wind combine to create enormous clouds that roll across the landscape.

Historically, dust storms have been most intense in dry regions of the American southwest, which were nicknamed the Dust Bowl in the 1930s for the prevalence of dust storms there. Farming can contribute to these storms through practices like tilling, which involves removing plants and breaking up ground to expose the soil to moisture and air. In the process, tilling severs the bonds holding soil together. If moisture from rain doesn’t come, the soil turns to dust, leaving it vulnerable to strong winds.

Sandstorms are also caused by wind picking up loose particles, but are typically limited to desert regions, such as the Gobi Desert in China or the Sahara in North Africa. They are often smaller than dust storms, since sand is relatively heavy and therefore harder for wind to keep aloft.  

For Hungry Minds

Recently a team from the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration found about 232 people had died from dust storm-related traffic accidents from 2007 and 2017.

In some years, dust storm fatalities were “comparable to some well-covered natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes and wildfires,” says Daniel Tong, lead author of the paper and associate professor of atmospheric chemistry at George Mason University.

Dust storms affect drivers mainly by making it impossible to see, but dust can also decrease tires’ traction on the road, causing cars to spin out of control. Beyond traffic fatalities, dust storms also worsen diseases like asthma and harm the lungs. “This dust gets into people’s respiratory systems,” says Mahowald. “It’s not good for humans.”

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Are dust storms getting worse.

According to a 2020   study , levels of wind-blown dust across much of the Great Plains have doubled over the last two decades, which the study attributed to expanded agriculture and intensifying climate change.

Experts expect that trend to continue. “I think they’re going to get worse,” says Mahowald. “We’ll probably have an expansion of agricultural land, and that allows more dust storms.” Tong says another key driver is climate change, which means “droughts become more frequent and more severe”, increasing the risk that land will dry out and become susceptible to dust storms.

One response would be to reduce the amount of land used for agriculture: this could be by reducing consumption, reducing production, or intensifying production in a smaller space Other traditional answers include farming without tilling the land (which requires other interventions to prepare the soil, like fertilizer), or planting ‘cover crops’ like rye and barley that hold the soil together between harvests and planting, according to Jonathan Coppess, a legal academic at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and former administrator of the Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency. Another solution would be to integrate animals to fields and plant a diverse array of crops.

Ironically, the country learned to apply these practices following the Dust Bowl storms of the 1930s, says Mahowald. “We know what to do,” she says. “It just really seems like they stopped paying attention to soil conservation.”

Coppess says preventative practices “are increasingly being adopted, but clearly they’re not prevalent.” He pointed to a lack of government support, with aid programs for farmers dealing with “a lot more demand than there is funding.”

Nonetheless, says Coppess, even these solutions are “not necessarily always going to work.” That’s especially true, he says, when climate change is making these weather phenomena worse.

What do we do in the meantime?

When the May dust storm hit central Illinois, Kevin Schott, the local emergency management director, was among those who responded. Schott has served for decades as a firefighter, including a stint in Iraq with the Illinois National Guard, where he saw the devastation sandstorms can cause. Even then, he says of the May dust storm, he has experienced “nothing like this that I can remember.”

Part of the problem was that his team was underprepared. Like most Americans, they thought of dust storms as a southwestern problem. As a result, Schott’s team lacked specialized equipment, which meant that while retrieving victims their eyes filled with dust and their only protection was low-grade masks through which the particles easily passed.

According to Mahowald and Tong, while dust storms will continue to be most intense in the American southwest, the problem will increasingly affect other states, making that lack of readiness a significant risk for both first responders and ordinary people.

If you’re caught in a dust storm, pull off the roadway wherever it’s safe to do so, put your flashers on, and wait until the storm blows out. That simple advice will save lives, says Schott. Part of the reason the Illinois dust storm was so deadly, he says, “was that people just did not slow down.”

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What Is a Dust Storm?

A dust storm approaches downtown Phoenix on August 11, 2012. Credit: NOAA

A dust storm is a wall of dust and debris that is often blown into an area by strong winds from thunderstorms. The wall of dust can be miles long and several thousand feet high.

Dust storms happen in many places around the world. Most of the world’s dust storms occur over the Middle East and North Africa. However, they can also happen anywhere in the United States. In the U.S., dust storms are most common in the Southwest, where they peak in the springtime.

On any given day, dust storms kick up a lot of dust into our air. In fact, scientists estimate that on average, about 44 billion pounds (20 teragrams) of dust are in Earth’s atmosphere at any one time.

The NOAA-20 weather satellite captured this image of a large dust storm over the Persian Gulf on May 13, 2018. Though beautiful from space, the dust was disruptive on the ground, causing flight delays for airlines. Credit: NOAA/NESDIS

What causes a dust storm?

Dust storms are caused by very strong winds — often produced by thunderstorms. In dry regions, the winds can pull dust from the ground up into the air, creating a dust storm.

An area’s geography and plant life can also make it more likely to have dust storms. For example, dust storms are common in regions that are flat and have very few trees and plants. These two features allow winds to build up momentum, causing the winds to grow stronger and drive more dust into the atmosphere.

NOAA’s GOES-16 weather satellite captured this video of a Saharan dust storm blowing off the western coast of Africa on December 19, 2017. About half of the dust suspended in Earth’s atmosphere originates in North Africa. Credit: NOAA/CIRA

Why are dust storms a problem?

Although dust storms may end after just a few minutes, dust can hang in the air and cause problems for days or even months afterward. Dust storms — and their lingering effects — can be hazardous for several reasons:

• A dust storm’s initial wall of dust and debris can arrive suddenly and can catch people by surprise.
• Dust storms can make it difficult to see when you’re driving a car and can lead to car accidents.
• Dust in the air can cause serious problems for airplanes. Dense dust can reduce visibility for pilots, causing delays and cancellations. Dust storms can also cause mechanical problems in airplanes.
• Breathing dusty air during a dust storm can cause health problems — especially for people with asthma.

A dust storm approaching Stratford, Texas, in April 1935. In the 1930s, the American prairie states experienced a period of severe drought and dust storms called the “Dust Bowl.” Credit: NOAA George E. Marsh Album

Is there a warning for dust storms?

If a dust storm is spotted in your area, your local National Weather Service forecast office will issue a dust storm warning. Scientists can also use weather satellites to catch the first signs of a dust storm to help forecasters give an even earlier warning.

Although it’s hard to miss dust storms on the ground, they can be difficult to spot from space. That’s because the dust is often the same color as the ground below, so the storm blends in with its surroundings.

However, the weather satellites of the GOES-R Series (short for Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R Series) have an instrument that can spot dust storms. The instrument, called the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI for short), is like a camera that takes pictures with many different filters. By combining and comparing information from these different types of pictures, scientists can spot the beginnings of a dust storm. This allows earlier warnings, which can keep cars, airplanes and people safe.

This animation, created with data from the GOES-16 weather satellite, shows blowing dust over New Mexico and Texas on April 13, 2018. The blowing dust is shown in dark magenta. Credit: NOAA/NESDIS/CIRA

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By: History.com Editors

Updated: April 24, 2023 | Original: October 27, 2009

The Dust Bowl was the name given to the drought-stricken southern plains region of the United States, which suffered severe dust storms during a drought in the 1930s. As high winds and choking dust swept the region from Texas to Nebraska, people and livestock were killed and crops failed across the entire region. The Dust Bowl intensified the crushing economic impacts of the Great Depression and drove many farming families on a desperate migration in search of work and better living conditions.

What Caused the Dust Bowl?

The Dust Bowl was caused by several economic and agricultural factors, including federal land policies, changes in regional weather, farm economics and other cultural factors. After the Civil War , a series of federal land acts coaxed pioneers westward by incentivizing farming in the Great Plains.

The Homestead Act of 1862, which provided settlers with 160 acres of public land, was followed by the Kinkaid Act of 1904 and the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909. These acts led to a massive influx of new and inexperienced farmers across the Great Plains.

Many of these late 19th and early 20th-century settlers lived by the superstition “rain follows the plow.” Emigrants, land speculators, politicians and even some scientists believed that homesteading and agriculture would permanently affect the climate of the semi-arid Great Plains region, making it more conducive to farming.

Manifest Destiny 

This false belief was linked to Manifest Destiny —an attitude that Americans had a sacred duty to expand west. A series of wet years during the period created a further misunderstanding of the region’s ecology and led to the intensive cultivation of increasingly marginal lands that couldn’t be reached by irrigation.

Rising wheat prices in the 1910s and 1920s and increased demand for wheat from Europe during World War I encouraged farmers to plow up millions of acres of native grassland to plant wheat, corn and other row crops. But as the United States entered the Great Depression , wheat prices plummeted. In desperation, farmers tore up even more grassland in an attempt to harvest a bumper crop and break even.

Crops began to fail with the onset of drought in 1931, exposing the bare, over-plowed farmland. Without deep-rooted prairie grasses to hold the soil in place, it began to blow away. Eroding soil led to massive dust storms and economic devastation—especially in the Southern Plains.

When Was the Dust Bowl?

The Dust Bowl, also known as “the Dirty Thirties,” started in 1930 and lasted for about a decade, but its long-term economic impacts on the region lingered much longer.

Severe drought hit the Midwest and southern Great Plains in 1930. Massive dust storms began in 1931. A series of drought years followed, further exacerbating the environmental disaster.

By 1934, an estimated 35 million acres of formerly cultivated land had been rendered useless for farming, while another 125 million acres—an area roughly three-quarters the size of Texas—was rapidly losing its topsoil.

Regular rainfall returned to the region by the end of 1939, bringing the Dust Bowl years to a close. The economic effects, however, persisted. Population declines in the worst-hit counties—where the agricultural value of the land failed to recover—continued well into the 1950s.

‘Black Blizzards’ Strike America

During the Dust Bowl period, severe dust storms, often called “black blizzards,” swept the Great Plains. Some of these carried topsoil from Texas and Oklahoma as far east as Washington, D.C. and New York City , and coated ships in the Atlantic Ocean with dust.

Billowing clouds of dust would darken the sky, sometimes for days at a time. In many places, the dust drifted like snow and residents had to clear it with shovels. Dust worked its way through the cracks of even well-sealed homes, leaving a coating on food, skin and furniture.

Some people developed “dust pneumonia” and experienced chest pain and difficulty breathing. It’s unclear exactly how many people may have died from the condition. Estimates range from hundreds to several thousand people.

On May 11, 1934, a massive dust storm two miles high traveled 2,000 miles to the East Coast, blotting out monuments such as the Statue of Liberty and the U.S. Capitol.

The worst dust storm occurred on April 14, 1935. News reports called the event Black Sunday. A wall of blowing sand and dust started in the Oklahoma Panhandle and spread east. As many as three million tons of topsoil are estimated to have blown off the Great Plains during Black Sunday.

An Associated Press news report coined the term “Dust Bowl” after the Black Sunday dust storm.

New Deal Programs

President Franklin D. Roosevelt established a number of measures to help alleviate the plight of poor and displaced farmers. He also addressed the environmental degradation that had led to the Dust Bowl in the first place.

As part of Roosevelt’s New Deal , Congress established the Soil Erosion Service and the Prairie States Forestry Project in 1935. These programs put local farmers to work planting trees as windbreaks on farms across the Great Plains. The Soil Erosion Service, now called the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) developed and promoted new farming techniques to combat the problem of soil erosion.

Okie Migration

Roughly 2.5 million people left the Dust Bowl states— Texas , New Mexico , Colorado , Nebraska , Kansas and Oklahoma—during the 1930s. It was one of the largest migrations in American history.

Oklahoma alone lost 440,000 people to migration. Many of them, poverty-stricken, traveled west looking for work. From 1935 to 1940, roughly 250,000 Oklahoma migrants moved to California . A third settled in the state’s agriculturally rich San Joaquin Valley.

These Dust Bowl refugees were called “Okies.” Okies faced discrimination, menial labor and pitiable wages upon reaching California. Many of them lived in shantytowns and tents along irrigation ditches. “Okie” soon became a term of disdain used to refer to any poor Dust Bowl migrant, regardless of their state of origin.

Dust Bowl in Arts and Culture

The Dust Bowl, and the suffering endured by those who survived it, captured the hearts and imaginations of the nation’s artists, musicians and writers.

John Steinbeck memorialized the plight of the Okies in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath . Photographer Dorothea Lange documented rural poverty with a series of photographs for FDR’s Farm Securities Administration, and artist Alexandre Hogue achieved renown with his Dust Bowl landscapes.

Folk musician Woody Guthrie , and his semi-autobiographical first album Dust Bowl Ballads of 1940, told stories of economic hardship faced by Okies in California. Guthrie, an Oklahoma native, left his home state with thousands of others looking for work during the Dust Bowl.

FDR and the New Deal Response to an Environmental Catastrophe. Roosevelt Institute . About The Dust Bowl. English Department; University of Illinois . Dust Bowl Migration. University of California at Davis . The Great Okie Migration. Smithsonian American Art Museum . Okie Migrations. Oklahoma Historical Society . What we learned from the Dust Bowl: lessons in science, policy, and adaptation. Population and Environment . The Dust Bowl. Library of Congress . Dust Bowl Ballads: Woody Guthrie. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings . The Dust Bowl. Ken Burns; PBS .

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The Dust Bowl

Written by: Paul Dickson, Independent Historian

By the end of this section, you will:.

• Explain the causes of the Great Depression and its effects on the economy

Suggested Sequencing

Use this narrative with the Photographs: The Dust Bowl and Rural Poverty, 1936-1937 Primary Source to have students analyze the impact of poverty during the Great Depression.

On May 11, 1934 an enormous dust storm, 1,500 miles long and 600 miles wide, was moving eastward across the Great Plains, eventually depositing 12 million pounds of dust on Chicago – four pounds for each person in the city. The particles from this storm were not the relatively insignificant kind that normally accumulate around the average house, but rather a total of 300 million tons of topsoil, parched to dust by drought and blown out of the Great Plains by a strong storm system that originated on the west coast.

The storm quickly moved into the cities to the east like Toledo, Cleveland, and Buffalo and then to the Eastern Seaboard. In some locales, the dust was so deep on the roads that snowplows were brought out to clear them. The storm took six hours to pass over Manhattan when it arrived there, and it brought the city to a halt. Cab drivers had to stop to remove dirt from their windshields, and commercial airplanes were grounded because of low visibility and fears that engines choked with dust would fail. In Boston, an airplane owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ventured into the storm and found that it extended over three miles (17,000 feet) into the upper atmosphere.

In its wake, the storm left a massive clean-up effort and bold headlines. “Huge Dust Cloud, Blown 1,500 Miles, Dims City 5 Hours” was the banner in the next morning’s New York Times . The Boston Globe carried  a front-page story reading, “Vast Dust Blanket Over New England.” The storm then blew out to sea, where people on ocean liners hundreds of miles from land saw the monster black clouds of dust billowing up from the west. One tanker captain operating many miles off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, reported that his ship was completely covered with a fine blanket of reddish-brown soil.

This was neither the first nor the last of the many dust storms of the 1930s, but it was the one that got the nation’s attention – the one that allowed people in the east from Richmond, Virginia, all the way north to the Canadian border to actually see, taste, and smell the phenomenon, and to suffer the respiratory distress that came along with it.

This storm was also the one that spurred legislation allowing a first step to be taken to alleviate the situation and give the dying Great Plains a new lease on life. The storm hit Washington, DC, just as testimony was being given by presidential advisor Hugh Bennett, who headed the Soil Erosion Service, a temporary government agency created to thwart the very conditions that had led to the dust storms. Bennett’s group was about to run out of money, and he was asking for new funding as well as a permanent agency to deal with soil conservation. Quickly, Congress passed legislation to create the Soil Conservation Service, which still exists today as the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

The most disastrous storm yet struck the Midwest on April 14, 1935, earning that day the name “Black Sunday” and causing a writer for the Associated Press to coin the term “Dust Bowl” to describe the area where these storms originated and did the greatest damage. Crops were being destroyed and, in some cases, the dust was piling up and drifting like snow, burying homes and farm buildings.

Pictured are a father and his two sons at their partly submerged house during a 1936 dust storm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma.

The economic effects of these storms were devastating, doubly so when coupled with the effects of the Great Depression. Unable to raise crops and pay their bills, farmers lost their land and migrated in search of work. Many families simply walked away from their farms and headed to the west coast, where they hoped to find work and where their children could breathe. Although they came from many states, not just Oklahoma, these migrants became known as “ Okies ,” which was almost always uttered as a term of disparagement.

But the question asked by Americans who had once seen the Great Plains as an earthy Garden of Eden was, “How did this happen?” Was this a disaster created by human folly and greed or just a cyclical natural occurrence an “act of God” as some believed?

The source of the dust was a great expanse of land that had once been inhabited by native peoples, native grasses, and herds of buffalo and had long existed as a sustainable environment, until it began to be settled by people moving west. In 1862, Congress had passed the Homestead Act, which was signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln and gave ownership of 160 acres to any person 21 years or older willing to settle on the Great Plains and farm the land for five years. When these settlers arrived, they began to plow up the native grass and the sod in which it was rooted. They were thus called “sodbusters,” and in the absence of forests to provide logs, they commonly built sod homes or “soddies” with strips of sod they lifted from the ground and piled up to form walls.

Then came the tractors and other gasoline-powered farm tools, which stripped more and more of the native grasses. This problem was exacerbated during World War I, when the high price of wheat and the needs of the Allied troops encouraged farmers to grow even more wheat, removing grass and seeding areas in the prairie states. Lands that had once been used only for grazing were being turned into wheat fields. There were even slogans that tied wheat to victory: Plant More Wheat! Wheat Will Win the War!

“The tractors had done what no hailstorm, no blizzard, no tornado, no drought . . ., nothing in the natural history of the southern plains had ever done,” writes historian Timothy Egan in The Worst Hard Time , his book about the Dust Bowl. “They had removed the native prairie grass . . . so completely that by the end of 1931 it was a different land – thirty-three million acres stripped bare in the southern plains.”

The immediate cause of the dust storms was the drought that began in the prairie states in 1931, when a lack of rain contributed to a decade-long dry spell. Farmers found it nearly impossible to raise their crops or feed their livestock, and they began losing money. Thousands could not pay their mortgages and lost their farms. Massive quantities of sun-dried topsoil were swept up into the air. Fourteen of the resulting large dust storms, or “black blizzards” as they were known, hit in 1932, and 38 rolled across the plains the following year. Then they started coming with even greater frequency.

The uprooting, poverty, and human suffering caused by the Dust Bowl and exacerbated by the Great Depression were all notably portrayed in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath , and in the graphic images produced by Dorothea Lange and other photographers working for the Farm Security Administration. Steinbeck’s book and Lange’s photographs, including one that has been called “Migrant Mother” and “Migrant Madonna,” have endured as reminders of a time of great despair in America.

After the creation of the Soil Conservation Service, the situation gradually improved as erosion-fighting practices were introduced and took hold. Farmers more routinely implemented crop rotation to refurbish the soil, along with methods of planting and ploughing that helped topsoil stay in place. During the 1930s, an army of young men belonging to the Civilian Conservation Corps also helped solve the problem by planting trees, shrubs, and grasses across the area to hold moisture and secure the topsoil. The southern Plains began to heal when the drought ended in the fall of 1939. It was mostly natural causes, however, that eventually restored the equilibrium of the land. Once rain returned in significant amounts, the ordeal of the Dust Bowl finally ended.

Review Questions

1. The Dust Bowl was created by all the following except

• extreme drought
• removal of prairie grass
• poor farming techniques that led to soil erosion
• the building of “soddies”

2. The Dust Bowl inflicted the most significant damage on which area of the United States?

• The Eastern Seaboard
• The Great Plains
• The Great Lakes region
• The Rocky Mountains

3. The plight of the victims of the Dust Bowl was portrayed by John Steinbeck in his novel

• The Worst Hard Time
• The Grapes of Wrath
• Migrant Mother
• Migrant Madonna

4. For economic opportunity, people known as “Okies” migrated toward which region of the United States?

• The Southeast, primarily Florida
• The Northeast, primarily New York City
• The West Coast, primarily California
• New England, primarily around Boston

5. Families who settled the Great Plains and built their homes from the available resources there were often called

Free Response Questions

• Analyze the events that led to the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression.
• Analyze the impact of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s on farmers in the United States.

AP Practice Questions

“We go around all dressed in rags While the rest of the world goes neat, And we have to be satisfied With half enough to eat. We have to live in lean-tos, Or else we live in a tent, For when we buy our bread and beans There’s nothing left for rent. I’d rather not be on the rolls of relief, Or work on the W. P. A., We’d rather work for the farmer If the farmer could raise the pay; Then the farmer could plant more cotton And he’d get more money for spuds [potatoes], Instead of wearing patches, We’d dress up in new duds. From the east and west and north and south Like a swarm of bees we come; The migratory workers Are worse off than a bum. We go to Mr. Farmer And ask him what he’ll pay; He says, “You gypsy workers Can live on a buck a day.”

Lester Hunter, “I’d Rather Not Be on Relief,” 1938

1. When the excerpted song was written, the government

• believed in providing welfare for all citizens
• created programs to provide jobs and relief for those suffering in the Great Depression
• required people to move where agricultural work could be offered
• provided no assistance to the people

2. One doctrine or policy that may have contributed to the conditions described in the excerpt was

• Manifest Destiny
• the Trail of Tears
• the Kansas-Nebraska Act
• the Homestead Act

3. The sentiments expressed in the excerpt most likely would have been espoused by which group?

• Progressives
• The Know-Nothings
• Abolitionists

Primary Sources

New York Times headline on May 12, 1934, was “Huge Dust Cloud, Blown 1,500 Miles, Dims City 5 Hours.” https://www.nytimes.com/1934/05/12/archives/huge-dust-cloud-blown-1500-miles-dims-city-5-hours-white-particles.html

Photographs created by the photographers of the Farm Security Administration: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa/

“Transcript of Homestead Act (1862).” https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=31&page=transcript

Suggested Resources

Egan, Timothy. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl . Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

Worster, Donald. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s . 25th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

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Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

In our resource history is presented through a series of narratives, primary sources, and point-counterpoint debates that invites students to participate in the ongoing conversation about the American experiment.

A Giant Dust Storm Is Heading Across the Atlantic

Dust from the Sahara can fertilize faraway lands and seas, but this supersize storm is a mixed blessing.

Each year, on average, a dizzying 182 million tons of dust departs from the western Sahara, enough to fill 689,290 semitrucks . These clouds of dust make up one of the greatest annual migrations on the planet—not animal, but mineral. It begins in the Sahara, where wind storms levitate enormous plumes of desert dust thousands of feet above the surface of the Earth. There, in camel-colored wisps thousands of miles long, the dust hitchhikes on trade winds traveling west, across the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea.

Saharan dust clouds make this transcontinental trek all the time, and on the way, the dust falls and settles in the ocean, in rain forests, and, occasionally, on the windshields of unsheltered cars. But the gargantuan plume currently making its way across the sky, over the Caribbean and heading toward the United States, is unusual for a Saharan dust cloud, both in volume and density. “It’s definitely a very significant amount of dust,” says Hongbin Yu , an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Photos: The strange beauty of sandstorms

A historic amount of dust, some say. “In terms of concentration and density and size, it is the most dust we’ve seen in 50 or 60 years,” says Pablo Méndez Lázaro , who researches environmental health at the University of Puerto Rico.

At first glance, a migration of brown dust—even one leaping across continents and oceans—might seem uninspiring compared with, say, the murmurations of monarch butterflies or stampedes of wildebeests. Admittedly, there is no “Planet Earth: Dust,” but maybe there should be. The Saharan dust cloud is a billowing ribbon of life-giving minerals such as iron and phosphorus that fertilize the most biodiverse oases on the planet, including the lush menagerie that is the Amazon rain forest. Phosphorus, a vital nutrient for plant growth, drains quickly from Amazonian soil after rainfall or flooding, escaping into waterways, and in the Amazon, abundant rain is a given. Luckily, a yearly windfall of 22,000 tons of Saharan dust delivers approximately enough phosphorus to replace the minerals leached by rainfall, according to a study Yu published in Geophysical Research Letters in 2015. And high within the jungle canopy, air plants depend on the mineral dust for nutrients as it falls slowly to Earth, according to Dale Griffin , an environmental and public-health microbiologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

Read: A burst of light unlike any captured before

Scientists have known about the long-distance celebrity relationship between the Sahara and the Amazon for more than a decade, giving researchers such as Yu years to analyze the exchange. But Saharan dust storms are driven by the seasonal migration of the winds themselves. The storms that head south to land directly in the Amazon occur in the winter and spring, Yu says. The current supersize Saharan plume is a summer storm, which means it’s heading northward, forecast to dump its swirling mass of particles into iron-limited waters of the tropical Eastern Pacific Ocean. If the forecasts are true, the impact on the ocean could be big, Yu says. The fertilizing effects of African dust on this particular oceanic biosphere are less studied than their effects on the Amazon.

Sea creatures are also thirsty for the precious minerals of Saharan dust, for better or for worse. “If you’re an alga, then you love dust,” Griffin says. A 2001 study in Limnology and Oceanography suggested that the seasonal windfalls of iron-rich Saharan dust become a banquet for red tides, blooms of algae that spill into the ocean like dye, deplete it of oxygen, and release toxins. Dust clouds can also host unwelcome stowaways. “These dust clouds carry a diverse community of microorganisms, some of which have the potential to be plant pathogens or human pathogens,” Griffin says. Some scientists suggest that the dust storms can carry fungal spores or bacteria that spread diseases in corals and encourage algae blooms.

Read: Coral reefs are bleaching too frequently to recover

The dust may be responsible for more alluring ocean phenomena too. Some scientists theorize that millions of years of this seasonal sprinkling of Saharan dust fed the cornucopia of corals encrusting the Bahamas, which are surrounded by waters that lack many of the nutrients required to create such an oasis. Like any kind of dust, it’s a mixed bag.

Humans, however, do not thrive in enormous dust plumes. To anyone living in its direct path, the dust cloud poses a significant hazard to public health. In one sense, there’s never been a better time to ask people to wear a mask—everyone has one. But there’s also never been a worse time to be surrounded by a miasma of particulate pollution that could trigger preexisting or new respiratory conditions. People living in areas with high levels of air pollution are more likely to die of COVID-19, according to a recent study .

Read: Why the coronavirus hits adults and kids so differently

Still, large brown dust storms have a silver lining. Though the Saharan clouds may look disastrous, they suppress hurricanes in several ways. The dry, dusty storms soak up moist, hurricane-friendly air like a sponge and can create sinking air and changing winds that tear apart baby hurricanes before they get big. Dust storms can also paint sunsets with sherbet-colored streaks. “When I drive down to St. Pete to go to work, I can see the dust—big orange streaks in the atmosphere,” Griffin says. “Though I haven’t actually been outside because of, well, the virus.”

When Méndez Lázaro looked out his bedroom window in downtown San Juan Tuesday morning, though, the sky was filled with dust, an impermeable, jaundiced gray. “It’s almost impossible to see the shoreline from my house,” he says, noting that he lives just a little more than a mile away. “I don’t remember ever seeing the sky like this in Puerto Rico.” He, along with everyone else on the island, is waiting for rain to wash away the far-flung dust from the air, the windows, and car windshields: a souvenir that is kind of impressive but that no one asked for.

Friday essay: hunger, dust-storms , war – how I defied the odds as a South Sudanese child refugee

Graduate researcher, Crime, Justice and Legal Studies, La Trobe University

Disclosure statement

Akuch Anyieth does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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My name is Akuch Kuol Anyieth. I am South Sudanese by birth, Kenyan by migration and life experience, and Australian by migration and citizenship.

I spent my childhood and some of my teenage years in Kakuma, a refugee camp in remote, arid, north-west Kenya, near the border with South Sudan. My childhood memories of the camp include hunger and thirst, dust storms, bites from scorpions, outbreaks of malaria and cholera — and violence.

Usually, the South Sudanese name their children after family members: grandfathers, grandmothers, aunties and uncles. Names can also be chosen to reflect the circumstances of a child’s birth. In the language of the Dinka tribe of South Sudan, tong means war, so the names Tong (male) or Atong (female) indicate that a child was born in a period of war.

My mother Mary Achol Anyuon gave birth to my sister Atong in 1988, during the Second Sudanese Civil War , in her birth village, Mar, on the White Nile in central South Sudan.

Baba, my father, Kuol Anyieth, was born in South Sudan and raised in Khartoum before the war. He completed his secondary education and most of his university studies in mechanical engineering there, before going to visit family in Mar, where he met Mama. According to both of them, it was love at first sight. They got married immediately and moved back to Khartoum, where my eldest sister Ajok was born.

Baba secured what Mama often referred to as a great job — as a mechanical engineer at a vehicle-production company established during the British colonial period. Baba worked for the company for many years, moving between the headquarters in Khartoum and a branch office in Wau, the capital of the state of Western Bahr el Ghazal, where my brother Anyieth was born.

As the war escalated, tensions rose between the Arab management and the Sudanese employees. When the company shut down, Mama and Baba moved back to Mama’s village.

My mother lost three children, Deng, Yom and Thon, to diseases caused by infections that could have been simply treated if the country was not in chaos. After Atong’s birth, she decided she had had enough of burying her dead children and would not have any more.

Nevertheless, three years later, I was born. All our family and friends were surprised. For three years Mama had kept her promise to herself, in a country with no access to contraception for women. Hence my name: Akuch, which in Dinka means “unknown” or “I don’t know”. I was the mysterious child who defied all the odds to be born, and to survive displacement, poverty and violence.

Towards the end of 1990, Baba heard that a refugee camp for displaced Sudanese refugees had been set up in Ethiopia, where the UN was distributing aid. The second civil war between the North and the South of Sudan had broken out in 1983, and as the war escalated Southerners escaped to this camp and to other neighbouring countries.

Baba wanted to move the family to the camp, but Mama was pregnant with me, so he decided to walk there with Anyieth. Mama says it was Baba’s way of teaching Anyieth how to be a man — to protect and provide for your family. They were going to try to get a portion of land in the camp, erect a shelter and then come back to Mar to get pregnant Mama, Ajok and Atong.

Baba and Anyieth were still in Ethiopia when Mama gave birth to me and tribal war broke out between the Nuer and Dinka tribes in South Sudan.

Mama ran with us from one village to another, seeking refuge. Baba and Anyieth started walking back to Sudan, hunting for us in every village. Somehow, we heard that they were heading towards a village call Kidepo, located in Eastern Equatoria. By the time we arrived, Baba had built two shacks for us there.

The family was finally reunited, but not for long. As soon as Baba settled Mama in Kidepo, he left to serve in the Sudan People’s Liberation Army driven by his undying dream of defending his nation of South Sudan — as were so many Sudanese men. My father was also determined to pursue his mechanical engineering career in the army. After Baba had gone, we moved from one village to another in Eastern Equatoria, for about three years. Villages were often attacked, or we would run out of food and have to move somewhere more peaceful.

When Mama heard that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had set up the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, she decided that we had to find a way to get there — for our safety, and in the hope of one day migrating to a western country.

Waiting for the cattle truck

I was five years old when I began the journey to Kakuma. With me were my mother, my two brothers — Anyieth and my new younger brother Gai —and my sister Atong. (My older sister, Ajok, had got married while we were in Laboni in South Sudan and moved to another refugee camp in Kenya.)

One evening, in the back of a truck, I heard my mother talking about me:

This child has been sleeping the entire journey and I am starting to wonder whether she has died of starvation. How can she sleep on this bumpy road, with the children screaming and soldiers stepping all over us?

Hours later, I opened my eyes. “Mama, where are we?” I bleated.

If you hadn’t been sleeping, you would know. Even Gai already knows where we are. We are in Lokichogio, on the border between South Sudan and Kenya, in a reception centre for displaced people seeking refuge in Kakuma.

None of that meant anything to me, of course.

I sat up straight and looked around. Gai and I were sharing a thin straw mat in a shelter with a concrete floor. Everywhere, people were crowded into structures made of plastic sheeting with tin roofs. Children were screaming and smoke from cooking fires hung in the air. Mama, Gai and I kept our place in the shelter, along with countless other families, while Anyieth and Atong went off to make friends with the rest of the children, just like they always did.

We stayed in Lokichogio for several weeks during late 1995 and early 1996, waiting to be granted refugee status so that we could move on to Kakuma. We also had to wait until a cattle truck became available to transport us the 121 kilometres to Kakuma.

Conditions had worsened in Sudan; more than 30 new families and other individuals arrived in the centre while we were there. Many were unaccompanied minors who had been separated from their families or lost their parents in the war. These children were usually processed first. There were also mothers with their children, but without their husbands, who had either been killed or, like my father, remained in the army fighting an unending war, in the hope of protecting their country.

The conditions in the centre were appalling. Children couldn’t run around and play. There was no protection from the heat: the shelter turned into an oven during the day and there were no trees. And there was nowhere to escape from the crowds either.

Around the centre was a high cyclone-wire fence topped with razor wire, something I had never seen before. Gai and I would lean against the fence, waving at everyone who passed by. It was our only entertainment. We would count how many people waved back at us; whoever got the most waves could wear the pair of flip-flops we had to share because Gai’s had been stolen.

Atong’s flip-flops were a no-go zone; she was not to be messed with. At eight-years-old, she had quickly become a fighter, standing up to all the kids her own age and some of the older ones too. When that girl placed a hand on her hip, sticking her chin in the air and pointing her index finger at you, you didn’t dare say a word. The only person she did not try her attitude on was our brother Anyieth, now 13-years-old.

When the truck for Kakuma arrived each day at midday, everyone lined up quickly, hoping their name would be called out by the UN workers. If it was called out, you had to get ready to leave at once. Like everyone else, we wanted to get out from behind those wire fences and away from the smelly crowd — all those body odours and the stink of babies’ poo and pee. The water brought into the centre was only for drinking; there was never enough for cooking and showering.

One day in February 1996 Mama dragged us through the crowd towards the front of the queue. When we heard her name called, followed by our names, we realised Anyieth was nowhere to be seen. Mama was in despair: she was convinced the truck would leave without us and we would get sick or die of starvation waiting for another one.

We split up to search, calling Anyieth’s name as loud as we could; Mama told us our lives depended on it. But we knew he must have gone to the Loki city centre with his friends. He usually returned later when it was cooler, rushing to get back before the 5 p.m. curfew.

That day, for some reason, he came running back at midday, breathless and soaked in sweat. Mama did not bother chastising him then; at least he was there.

We were loaded onto the truck like goats, but, as we drove off, the hope we had invested in Kakuma grew.

‘Shut your yapping mouths’

On the truck, Mama berated Anyieth:

If you don’t change your ways, especially your daytime disappearing acts, I’ll send you back to Baba and you can go off and fight the war with him! You are not doing your duty as the eldest son.

After all, that was what any true Dinka boy did in the absence of his father — he became the head of the family. Mama was desperate for Anyieth to help her look after us. But Anyieth’s way was to stay quiet and continue to do his own thing.

Another woman joined in, agreeing with Mama that as women they were wasting their time, energy and resources raising sons who did nothing but wait to pick up their fathers’ guns to fight the endless war. They went on for a while, blaming the government in North Sudan; the late John Garang de Mabior , who founded the Sudan People’s Liberation Army; the soldiers who agreed to fight; the religious differences between North and South Sudan; and especially the North for not letting the Southerners be.

All of a sudden, a soldier shouted at Mama and her new friend.

If you don’t shut your yapping months, women, I’m going to stop the truck and throw you out to be raped by those wild Turkana men!

I can tell you that it sounded worse in Dinka. The word “rape” in Dinka is not something you can say out loud in public, and especially not to a woman.

The man must have been around seven feet tall. He had a deep, domineering voice, and big, wide, red eyes. The whole truck went quiet, except for the crying of some small children.

Read more: South Sudan

Arriving ‘nowhere’

Kakuma means “nowhere” in Swahili, and akuma means “to be judged” in Dinka. Both words sum up the experiences of those in Kakuma: “to be judged in nowhere”.

The local Kenyan people are called the Turkana, and they were notorious for robbing, raping and murdering the refugees living in the camp. The only access to Kakuma was by the degraded road from the towns on either side, Lodwar and Lokichogio. Temperatures varied between the high 30s and 45C, sometimes dropping to the low 30s at night, forcing people to sleep outside their tents and shacks.

A nomadic tribe, the Turkana people survived by selling charcoal and firewood, by begging or robbing houses, and by raising cattle. They could not farm due to the extreme weather conditions and lack of water. And crop seeds were difficult to obtain.

When the refugees settled in Kakuma, they traded maize, flour and oil for Turkana charcoal and firewood, but as time went by, refugees had to manage with the little they had left until the next food distribution. Sometimes the UN would distribute firewood, which made it even harder for the Turkana people to sell their own wood, and made them hostile towards the refugees.

Kakuma had been operating for about four years when we arrived. Set up in 1992 to provide shelter for the South Sudanese “Lost Boys of Sudan” (thousands of kids who had been displaced by the civil war), the camp grew rapidly.

Kakuma was filled with long-term refugees from many countries, like Ethiopia and Somalia, as well as South Sudan, for the most part living in desperation, all waiting to be granted asylum in first-world countries.

While we were there, it was divided into three sections: Kakuma One, Two and Three, which were further subdivided on the basis of ethnic groups, tribes and clans (family divisions within tribes). We were placed in Kakuma One, Group 11, which was populated by different clans from ours. I was not surprised that Baba had arranged for us to be in this group; he was appalled by the idea of people living in different tribes, a division he considered harmful to South Sudanese unity and peace.

After hours of bumping around in the back of the truck with no water breaks, we arrived in central Kakuma town, where we were greeted by a relentless dust storm. We received initial help from our relatives on Baba’s side of the family. They had already been processed and had agreed to host our family of five on a short-term basis.

At first, Mama was not happy with the idea of us settling in Kakuma One — she would have preferred us to be with her relatives in Kakuma Two — but things were better once we started making friends. At least Gai, Atong and Anyieth did; I wasn’t the type of child who made friends.

Ajok’s in-laws were in Kakuma One, Group 13, and they were happy to help Mama look for a piece of land where we could build at least one tin-roofed, mudbrick shack.

Communication with the outside world was hard in Kakuma. There was only one radio station and you had to make an appointment days or weeks ahead to call to Sudan or Loki. This was obviously no help in an emergency. We would go several months without any communication with Baba. Mama relied on people travelling to and from Sudan to pass on messages that we were okay, and Baba sent return messages to us.

After a couple of weeks, we had overstayed our welcome with our relatives. Tensions were growing: my siblings and I fought over hand- made toys with our relatives’ three kids, and Mama was tired of being told what to do by their mother. But we still hadn’t found somewhere else to live. The only available plots of land were located at the edge of the group, where there were few or no neighbours, which left us at risk from attack by the Turkana people.

At last we heard about a place located in Group 56. Mama leapt in and bought it for 15,000 Kenyan shillings, the equivalent of A$150. She was thrilled. We could not have afforded it without the help of my Uncle Dut, who had migrated to the United States as a Lost Boy.

Group 56 was mainly populated by people from Central Equatoria in South Sudan, along with a couple of families from other mixed tribes. Our compound, about 30 square metres, had one dilapidated mud brick shack with a polythene-sheeting roof.

A mud-brick shack and school

It was not adequate for us all, but it was ours and we children had space to run around. It flooded constantly in the rain and turned into a furnace during the dry season. We did not have enough money to build another shack or even a kitchen. Mama and Atong waited until late in the evening when it was cooler to cook outside on an open fire.

During the day we sat under a small thorn tree outside our mud shack. Mama was strict about us not mixing with the neighbours’ kids — she said we’d be looking for trouble and she was not ready for a fight. But no matter how many lectures she delivered, Anyieth would still go out with his new friends. We rarely saw him during the day; he would only stay home if he was sick.

Soon after we arrived, Mama took us to the nearby Jebel Marra Primary School. We had never been to school before this one. The principal enrolled Gai and me in Grade 1, because we knew our alphabet and numbers. Atong was enrolled in Grade 2 and Anyieth in Grade 4.

Gai was often sick, school became off and on for him. Mama said it was malaria; every illness was called malaria in Kakuma. People were not educated enough to know the difference between a life-threatening disease like malaria and a cold or the flu. Gai complained of headaches, was constantly vomiting and started to lose weight. Mama made him stay home until he got better.

The teachers had no idea about the fights that went on outside the classrooms. The majority of them had only completed the Kenyan Certificate of Secondary Education, the equivalent of Year 12 in Australia. There was no proper authority to check teachers’ qualifications. Anyone who knew their English and Swahili alphabets could become a teacher.

Every grade had five subjects: English, Swahili, maths, science, and Christian Religious Education. My siblings and I now had four languages to practise. As well as learning English and Swahili at school, we spoke Dinka, my mother tongue, and Arabic, because Mama and Baba spoke it to us sometimes.

Our neighbours were from the Equatoria region, where Arabic was widely spoken, and we played with their kids in school, so we all spoke Arabic to each other.

Linguistically, our house was chaotic. During Baba’s short visits he didn’t care whether we spoke in Dinka or Arabic. He believed that the more languages we spoke, the smarter we’d become.

Mama, on the other hand, was strict about us only speaking Dinka at home. “Leave those other languages outside my house! We are the Dinka people and we only speak Dinka in this house.” We hated it — we just wanted to speak Swahili and Arabic. They sounded cool.

This is an edited extract from Unknown: A Refugee’s Story by Akuch Kuol Anyieth (Text Publishing).

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Essay on “Describe a Dust Storm” Complete Essay for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Describe a dust storm in which you were recently caught

Essay No. 01

One day it so happened that my cousin and I were going on cycles to see the Taj Mahal. It was during the last vacation. I was staying with my uncle who was an S.P. at Agra in those days. My uncle’s son who is my age was with me. The day had been very hot and dull. So at nearly four in the afternoon, we picked up our cycles and made the Taj our first destination. We had a mind to go to see certain historical tombs at a distance of about eight miles from Agra. Hardly had we passed by the historical Red Fort, when our eyes, caught sight of a dull pale-colored sky in the west. Obviously, a dust storm was on its way.

As we went along, we were caught in the dust storm ongoing only a few hundred years further. Being pushed very strongly our cycles and dropped them on the roadside. We covered our eyes without hands and crouched low on the ground for our safety. Gradually the haziness of the scene changed into darkness and the whole of Nature seemed to be out of joint. Trees shook before the dust storm just as a man does before a giant. The sound of cracking and rustling was coming constantly as well as the face was being slapped by the merciless blasts of wind. Sometimes small pebbles flew and struck the body. Life itself was in danger. It was a most dreadful scene. Every minute we said God alone knew what would happen. At last, things took a turn for the better and the fury of the storm began to abate. The sky was clear in about fifteen minutes. Thank God that the god of rain did not lose his temper. Even then the harm that had been done was not little.

Now we picked our way. We found that run into a tree and got seriously damaged. Quite a large number of birds and their young ones had lost their lives and cloud be seen lying dead here and thirteen some very big trees had fallen and many had lost their branches. We could easily imagine what would have happened in the city. The next day we era dint the newspapers in the headlines. The like of the dust storm that came in Agra yesterday was never before seen during the last twenty years. Many lives were lost and great damages are done. We shall never forget the terrific storm.

Essay No. 02

A Dust Storm

It is said that dust storms are very common in deserts, particularly during the summer season. But I had a taste of it in my own town last Monday.

I was going on my bicycle to the market. It was afternoon. The day had been quite hot since morning.

It was just by chance that I looked towards the sky, especially because the sun’s light had suddenly grown dim.

The weather had been stuffy for so many hours. But I was surprised to find a sudden gush of wind making the cycle-riding difficult for me and to move forward. But determined as I was to go to the market, I continued my efforts.

I couldn’t realize then that the worst was yet to come. And it came sooner rather than later. In short, a violent storm overtook me and virtually reversed my march forward. I realized as if some force was compelling me to move backward.

As if this was not enough, I was soon engulfed in the violent cylindrical whirlwind. I felt as if I was going to be carried away by the cruel wind. To cap it all, a shower of dust fell on me and it was a few minutes later that I was able to see my entire body and all my clothes well-pasted or showered with fine particles of dust. For the time being, I only felt that my eyes had been blinded with dust and I could see nothing.

I heard the loud noise of the roaring wind as well as several hoardings and other articles being carried away by the wind.

Not much later, the storm was over. The atmosphere had cleared and the cool fresh wind began to blow. I did not find the compensation from Nature inadequate and felt satisfied despite all the inconvenience I had experienced.

(303 Words)

Essay No. 03

The months of the summer bring with them many hardships for the people. One such hardship is the continual occurrences of the dust-storm. A dust storm can be defined as powerful gusts of wind carrying with it large amounts of dust and mud.

There was a time when the dust-storms were limited to the desert areas of the country. However, with increasing deforestation and loss of tree cover, they have become common even in other parts of the country.

I had the misfortune of getting caught in the dust storm once. The day was as usual hot and uncomfortable. Not a leaf was moving, when all of a sudden the sky began to darken with yellow dust clouds. Soon the whole sky was covered with them. They hid the sun behind them. Within a few minutes, the wind started blowing. Initially, the speed of the wind was slow. However, it soon gathered momentum and a raging storm engulfed everything. Instead of rain, the sky was showering yellow-brown dust from the sky. It was a terrible sight. The wind was making shrieking and howling sounds. Many roofs were blown away in the wind. The storm uprooted many trees. The temperature had dropped suddenly. Many electric poles were damaged, plunging many localities into darkness.

The storm lasted about 30 minutes. The storm was followed by a light shower, which had brought relief to the people. The storm had disrupted the complete civic system. Traffic had come to a standstill. Many trees were uprooted and had blocked the roads. Electric wires and broken poles were everywhere.

As life came back to normal people saw that some persons were injured during the storm. There was large-scale damage all around. There were dust and mud all around. We realized that the damage control would take many days.

The only good thing that had come out of the storm was the change of weather. It had come as a harbinger of rains. And true enough only a few days after the storm the rains came and brought relief from the sting of the hot weather.

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Out of the Dust

Karen hesse, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Home — Essay Samples — History — Dust Bowl — “Out of the Dust”: An Analysis of Themes and Characters

"Out of The Dust": an Analysis of Themes and Characters

• Categories: Dust Bowl

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Words: 778 |

Published: Sep 12, 2023

Words: 778 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

Table of contents

Introduction, themes in "out of the dust", character analysis, cultural awareness and understanding.

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Tornado leaves deadly toll in Iowa

GREENFIELD, Iowa (AP) — Multiple people were killed when a tornado tore through a small town in Iowa and left a wide swath of obliterated homes and crumpled cars, while the howling winds also twisted and toppled wind turbines.

After devastating Greenfield, a town of 2,000, on Tuesday the storms moved eastward to pummel parts of Illinois and Wisconsin, knocking out power to tens of thousands of customers in the two states.

Greenfield’s hospital was among the buildings that were damaged in the town, which meant that at least a dozen people who were hurt had to be taken to facilities elsewhere, according to Iowa State Patrol Sgt. Alex Dinkla.

READ MORE: Oklahoma town sees second tornado in 5 weeks as deadly storms hit central U.S.

“Sadly we can confirm that there have been fatalities,” Dinkla said at a news conference Tuesday night, without specifying how many. “We’re still counting at this time.”

He said he thought they had accounted for all of the town’s residents but that searches would continue if anyone was reported missing. The Adair County Health System said in a Facebook post Tuesday night that it had set up a triage center at the Greenfield high school and that people who need medical attention should go there.

The tornado destroyed much of Greenfield, which is located about 55 miles (90 kilometers) southwest of Des Moines, during a day that saw multiple tornadoes, giant hail and heavy rain in several states. The National Weather Service said it received 23 tornado reports Tuesday, with most in Iowa, and one each in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Authorities announced a mandatory curfew for the town and said they would only allow residents to enter Greenfield until Wednesday morning. They also ordered media representatives to leave the city Tuesday night.

In the aftermath of the storm, mounds of broken wood from homes, branches, car parts and other debris littered lots where homes once stood. Some trees still standing were stripped of their limbs and leaves. Residents helped each other salvage furniture and other belongings that were strewn in every direction.

Damage is seen outside of the Adair County Health System hospital, which was evacuated after a tornado struck the day prior, in Greenfield, Iowa, on May 22, 2024. Photo by Zach Boyden-Holmes/The Register/USA Today Network via REUTERS

Rogue Paxton said he sheltered in the basement of his home when the storm moved through. He told WOI-TV he thought the house was lost but said his family got lucky.

“But everyone else is not so much, like my brother Cody, his house just got wiped,” Paxton said. “Then you see all these people out here helping each other. … Everything’s going to be fine because we have each other, but it’s just going to be really, really rough. It is a mess.”

A tornado also apparently took down several 250-foot (76-meter) wind turbines in southwest Iowa. Some of the turbines caught fire, sending plumes of smoke into the air. Wind farms are built to withstand tornadoes, hurricanes and other powerful winds.

Greenfield bills itself on its website as a “friendly wave as you walk” type of place with tree-lined streets — before the storm — and as the “perfect place to grow.”

Mary Long, the owner of Long’s Market in downtown Greenfield, said she rode out the storm at her business in the community’s historic town square, which largely escaped damage. Long said there appeared to be widespread damage on the east and south sides of town.

“I could hear this roaring, like the proverbial freight train, and then it was just done,” she said.

READ MORE: Severe storms pummel the Midwest, including reported tornadoes that destroyed homes

Camille Blair said the Greenfield Chamber of Commerce office where she works closed around 2 p.m. ahead of the storm.

“I can see from my house it kind of went in a straight line down the road,” she said of the tornado.

Gov. Kim Reynolds said she planned to visit Greenfield on Wednesday morning.

“It was just a few weeks ago that tornadoes hit several other Iowa communities, and it’s hard to believe that it’s happened again,” she said in a statement. “Iowans are strong and resilient, and we will get through this together.”

Iowa had braced for severe weather after the weather service’s Storm Prediction Center gave most of the state a high chance of seeing severe thunderstorms with the potential for strong tornadoes. The storms and tornado warnings moved into Wisconsin on Tuesday evening and night.

Earlier in the day, residents to the west in Omaha, Nebraska, awoke to sirens blaring and widespread power outages as torrential rain, high winds and large hail pummeled the area. The deluge flooded basements and submerged cars. Television station KETV showed firefighters rescuing people from vehicles.

In Illinois, dust storms led authorities to shut down stretches of two interstates due to low visibility.

The storms followed days of extreme weather that have ravaged much of the middle section of the country. Strong winds, large hail and tornadoes swept parts of Oklahoma and Kansas late Sunday, damaging homes and injuring two in Oklahoma.

Another round of storms Monday night raked Colorado and western Nebraska and saw the city of Yuma, Colorado, blanketed in hail the size of baseballs and golf balls, turning streets into rivers of water and ice.

In Texas, deadly storms hit the Houston area last week, killing at least eight people. Those storms Thursday knocked out power to hundreds of thousands for days, leaving many in the dark and without air conditioning during hot and humid weather. Hurricane-force winds reduced businesses and other structures to debris and shattered glass in downtown skyscrapers.

Bob Oravec, lead forecaster with the weather service, said the system is expected to turn south Wednesday, bringing more severe weather to parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and southern Missouri.

McFetridge reported from Des Moines and Beck reported from Omaha. Associated Press writers Steve Karnowski in Minneapolis, Josh Funk in Omaha, Colleen Slevin in Denver and Juan Lozano in Houston contributed.

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Extreme weather blunts the US military's technological edge

• Severe weather degrades the accuracy of navigation systems and hampers military operations.
• Climate change has made weather patterns more erratic and harder to forecast.
• This makes it harder for commanders to plan missions and prepare for weather effects.

More extreme weather is scrambling the high-tech systems that have given the US military its edge.

For example, severe weather can degrade navigation systems such as GPS and sensors on precision-guided munitions. Heavy rain ground aircraft and drones, intense heat exhausts troops, dust storms gum up tank engines, and storms damage ships at sea. Smoke and sandstorms blind aerial drones. Commanders and troops need to have a good idea of what the weather will be like the next day or the next month — forecasts that are getting fouled by the growing unpredictability of weather patterns.

"Reliably forecasting extreme weather's frequency and intensity to inform strategy is perhaps the most important challenge for the US and allied militaries to adapt to or mitigate a changing climate, because it is imperative that operations and campaigns are feasible meteorologically," warned James Regens in a recent essay for the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank.

Unexpected weather has always frustrated the best-laid plans of commanders. Had rain not turned the ground muddy the night before the battle, Napoleon might have been able to move up his artillery and win at Waterloo . Surprise dust storms crippled helicopters in the daring American operation to rescue hostages from Iran in 1980. And rain and rough seas almost caused the D-Day landings in June 1944 to be cancelled. But in military meteorology's finest hour, sharp-eyed Allied weathermen were able to forecast a break in the storms that the Germans didn't foresee, which allowed the invasion to achieve tactical surprise.

However, these mishaps reflect weather, which is a short-term phenomenon. Climate refers to long-term patterns, including the probability of severe weather. While climate change has become a highly politicized issue, there is general agreement among scientists that the Earth's climate is getting warmer.

This doesn't mean the weather will be hotter everywhere all the time, but it does indicate that severe weather events — heat, rain, even snow — will be more intense when they happen. One example is California in 2024, which went from years of drought to "atmospheric rivers" that dumped massive amounts of rain that caused mudslides and damaged homes and roads.

Related stories

This can be catastrophic for farmers and people living in flood zones. But it's equally bad for militaries, especially those with advanced capabilities such as the US armed forces, which rely on delicate and interconnected systems that can be degraded by weather.

For example, meteorological information is key to the position, navigation and timing (PNT) systems that enable many guided weapons and communications networks to function and coordinate. "Precision fires, aircraft flight operations, surface warship maneuver, ballistic missile trajectories and satellite launch windows to support intelligence collection and communications systems all depend on reliable PNT solutions grounded in meteorological projections," wrote Regens, an intelligence expert and founding partner of Antiphon Solutions, an Oklahoma-based analytics firm.

This puts a premium on developing models and technologies that can offer accurate short- and long-term weather forecasts, and do so even as scientific understanding of the impact of global climate change evolves. The strategic implications are profound. For example, knowing the rate at which Arctic ice is melting — creating new shipping channels and uncovering mineral riches — is of great interest to many nations.

Arctic warming creates a "significant homeland defense and national security challenge for US and allied decision-making for North America and NATO's northern flank in Europe," Regens told Business Insider. "Add to this mix the humanitarian missions the US military does in response to floods, monsoons, and other weather problems, and the Pentagon and NATO need to recognize the risk extreme weather in a changing climate poses to military operations."

However, Regens points to another problem: getting timely weather forecasts to those who need them. "Military forecasting works fine as long as units have secure network access to near-real time numerically predictive weather information for planning and executing missions," Regens told Business Insider.

The problem is that tactical units on the front lines, or in remote areas, often lack the connectivity to receive weather reports. "NOAA [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], the private sector and universities are actively working to improve global weather models," Regens said. "The missing link is compressing this capability into a tactical package for warfighters."

"This requires a major effort to meet the requirements of tactically disaggregated, independently operating units for immediate reliable data," said Regens. "Otherwise, they are going to have limited success firing highly lethal and expensive munitions at significant ranges."     

Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds an MA in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn .

Watch: How US troops train in the Arctic tundra in Alaska

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Storm Carves Path of Destruction Across Houston

At least four people were killed when powerful weather ripped through the region. Officials were taking stock of the damage on Friday.

In Photos and Video

Credit... Jon Shapley/Houston Chronicle, via Associated Press

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By The New York Times

• May 17, 2024

A powerful storm tore through Texas on Thursday evening , killing at least four people and battering the state with destructive winds and heavy rain.

The force of the storm caused widespread damage in Houston, blowing out the glass windows of ground-level storefronts and downtown high-rises. It toppled trees, downed power lines and even ripped apart a wall at a downtown nightclub, leaving piles of bricks.

Nearly a million utility customers were still without power on Friday morning, and officials said that the storm brought winds with speeds of up to 100 miles per hour. With some roads still blocked off, officials have warned people to stay home as they assess the damage and clear debris.

Here’s a look at the damage in Houston from the storm.

Workers cleaning up shattered glass inside a damaged downtown restaurant after the storm ripped out the windows.

The rapper Trae tha Truth, in yellow, cutting fallen tree limbs that fell on a car in downtown Houston. The storm toppled trees and downed power lines.

At least two people were killed by falling trees, officials said, and firefighters responded to reports of gas leaks and downed power lines, including one across a major highway. Officials said on Friday that it could take up to 48 hours to fully restore power across the region.

Power lines were damaged by high winds, causing widespread service disruptions.

Downed transmission in Cypress, Texas, northwest of Houston.

A car was crushed when bricks from a damaged building fell in a downtown parking lot in Houston.

Many roads and streets were impassable and traffic lights were not working across Houston.

Look at these windows. Insane. Wow.

Windows were blown out in several downtown skyscrapers.

Schools in Houston canceled classes on Friday. Videos circulating online showed rain whipping through the closed roof of Minute Maid Park as the Houston Astros faced the Oakland Athletics.

Local news broadcasts reported considerable damage in downtown Houston, with the force of the winds shattering the windows of high-rise buildings.

Heavy rain outside a grocery store.

People surveyed damage to a building under construction west of downtown Houston.

The storm toppled trees across Houston. Officials asked people to stay home as crews assessed damage.

Trees were uprooted across the city.

Residents took refuge in their homes and their cars, and in nearby buildings, as the storm passed through the city.

As officials continued to clear the damage on Friday morning, downtown streets were blanketed with glass shards and other debris.

A downtown nightclub, where a wall collapsed into dust and brick, was among the most badly damaged buildings in Houston.

Louisiana Street in downtown Houston was littered with glass shards and other debris on Friday morning.

Brent Lewis and Isabella Kwai contributed reporting.

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