Biggest Sahara Dust Storm In 50 Years Hits The US

A ‘HISTORIC’ outbreak of Saharan dust that is clogging the atmosphere from western Africa to the Caribbean and potentially posing health threats could make it as far as the U.S. Midwest.

While the phenomenon is an annual occurrence, “This dust episode has a huge spatial extent,” said Andrea Sealy, a meteorologist with the Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology in Barbados.

And for the time being at least, it is yielding a collateral benefit to property owners on the Gulf and Atlantic Coast, and to U.S. taxpayers. All that dust suppresses storms in the subtropical Atlantic, one of the world’s most productive hurricane-spawning grounds.

This particular outbreak could well be among the largest of the last 60 years, said Frank D. Marks, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Hurricane Research Division in Miami, and who is familiar with the orange-tinted fallout that has descended upon his car in