‘Godzilla’ dust storm traced to shaky northern jet stream

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/godzilla-dust-storm-traced-shaky-northern-jet-stream

Source:  By Warren Cornwall, Science Magazine. 

Excerpt: In June, residents of Puerto Rico woke to a Sun shrouded in a thick haze, and everything outside seemingly coated in reddish dust. Little did they know the phenomenon was connected to winds swept up by the largest African dust storm on record—an event so massive, scientists have dubbed it Godzilla. These winds, researchers now report, were in turn triggered by a meandering jet stream that circles the planet farther north. The new findings identify yet another way in which a warming Arctic might disturb the weather half a world away. The root cause of the extra-wavy jet stream is under fierce debate, but some scientists believe Arctic warming and declining sea ice are to blame for Godzilla’s far-reaching effects. “Arguably there is at least an indirect connection between climate change and this notable dust storm,” says Michael Mann, an atmospheric scientist at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, who has studied how Arctic changes might influence summer weather farther south. The Godzilla storm was truly monster-size. Desert winds known as the harmattan set records, blowing at more than 70 kilometers per hour across northwestern Africa. A plume of pink-tinted dust nearly as big as the continental United States drifted west across the Atlantic Ocean. It weighed nearly 24 million tons—enough to fill thousands of Olympic-size swimming pools, says Hongbin Yu, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Such storms are annual events with far-reaching effects. The phosphorus-rich clouds fertilize trees in the Amazon. The tiny particles of dust can also pollute the air across the Caribbean, presenting a serious health hazard. And research suggests the dust clouds, by reflecting sunlight to space, cool the tropical Atlantic Ocean in a way that might dampen hurricanes....