Travel on I-10 between Las Cruces and points west and you become aware of dramatic dust storms, especially if the State Police close the road and hold you a captive of safety considerations. In my experience, these haboobs appear to be notably more frequent now, but there are good meteorological records. They don’t pertain only to us in the southwestern US.
Lu Yang and colleagues at Peking University dug deeply into the data. They found that increasing dust storm frequency between 2001 and 2019 correlates with an increasing gap in time between the annual end of snowmelt and the annual beginning of the plant growing season. The gap increased for 44% of the area of North America and for 53% of Europe and Asia. Longer dry soil times allow more dust to be ready to fly.
Well, here in Las Cruces, we’ve seen it drier than ever the past two years without the usual Arizona Monsoon. We don’t have our soils watered by snowmelt, other than by limited irrigation, but tamping down dust with rain is now rare.
A webinar by the Advanced Environmental Monitoring company last year shows that we missed out from what is an unexplained shift in atmospheric circulation from here down to northern Chihuahua. This is an unwelcome change that may last a long time. Maybe we can induce rain by all of us washing our cars!
This has been an outreach activity of the Las Cruces Academy, viewable at GreatSchools.org.
Source: Nature 642: 11 (5 June 2025) , citing Global Change Biology 31: e70236 (2025)
Image: 330. skynews-dust-storm-new-mexico_6847265.jpg, from 5 March
