New Scientist
Image: David Stanley
Weather forecasters should keep an eye on the Sahara. Dust clouds from the desert may help them predict how bad the hurricane season will be.
Every year, up to 200 million tonnes of Saharan dust is blown across the Atlantic towards the Caribbean, and William Lau and Kyu-Myong Kim of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, wanted to find out if these dust clouds were blocking the sun’s rays and cooling the surface of the sea. “This information could be used for hurricane forecasting,” Lau says. Because warm surface waters of the Caribbean and western Atlanticprovide energy to fuel cyclones, a cooler surface would offset this effect. Read more on newscientist.com…
