US braces for 'dirty rain' as airborne threat chokes Southeast
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A massive plume of dust the size of the US is set to drop buckets of mud from the sky on the entire Southeast. The approaching dust cloud is coming from the Sahara Desert and was formed by strong winds sweeping tiny sand and mineral particles off the surface. By Thursday, meteorologists are warning that the rain in Florida, Georgia, Alabama , and the Carolinas could combine with the dust to create showers of 'dirty rain' throughout the region.
Officials in Puerto Rico have already warned residents of poor air quality as the dust swept over the Caribbean earlier this week. The Saharan cloud made landfall in Florida on Wednesday. The AccuWeather team noted that most of the Saharan dust will likely remain thousands of feet high in the atmosphere, meaning it will have little impact on air quality at ground level.
This year's plume is different as it's earlier, denser, and more concentrated, with higher levels of fine particles. As a result, health officials and meteorologists are keeping a close eye on its impact. The size and intensity of these clouds vary from year to year, but scientists believe shifting wind patterns and climate change may be contributing to more frequent and powerful plumes. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has estimated that over 180 million tons of dust leaves Africa every year.
It results in extremely dry air that local reduces thunderstorm activity in the US and cuts down on the formation of tropical cyclones in the Atlantic. If the forecasted storms in the Southeast this week overcome that dry air, it will likely mean several days of a 'muddy mix' falling from the sky. Meteorologists said that flash flooding and thunderstorms are expected throughout Florida all night on Wednesday.
A slow-moving storm system will collide with the dust cloud Thursday as it moves beyond Florida, potentially bringing dust-filled showers to millions along the East Coast. At the same time, another massive plume is making its way down from Canada , filling most of the Eastern and Central US with dangerous wildfire smoke. AccuWeather has warned that air quality has already reached hazardous to dangerous levels in parts of the Dakotas, Illinois , Iowa , Michigan , Minnesota , Montana, Nebraska , and Wisconsin.
Forecasters are also warning that New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and most of New England will experience reduced air quality as the haze from the wildfires moves east. AccuWeather Meteorologist Brandon Buckingham said many Americans will only see the smoke cause dimmer sunsets and hazy skies, but there will still be cases where it travels closer to the ground and triggers serious breathing issues. 'There will be episodes where the smoke can reach the lower levels of the atmosphere and affect visibility and air quality,' Buckingham explained.
'That could be a safety concern for travel in extreme cases and pose health problems for some individuals with respiratory issues,' he added. The smoke is traveling east from massive forest fires in western Canadian provinces like Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia. The scenes playing out this week in the northern US are similar to the apocalyptic sigh t across the East Coast in 2023, when Canadian wildfires turned the sky orange and shrouded entire city skylines.
In the South, the effect of the Saharan dust cloud will have a similar impact on local skies, creating hazy skies and colorful sunrises and sunsets. People in Florida will start to see these sights starting Wednesday, with millions across the Southeast and Gulf seeing the dust-filled skies by Friday. As for the wildfire smoke in the northern half of the country, rain moving into the Upper Midwest will likely bring the smell of smoke right to people's noses, especially in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
AccuWeather explained that rainfall can bring the smell of wildfire smoke down to ground level, so people standing outside when it rains will notice the odor more. However, the rainfall will also help to cleanse the air of the smoky particles and improve overall air quality in the region. Throughout the rest of summer 2025, meteorologists are expecting northern states like Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington to experience the worst air quality due to the ongoing Canadian wildfires.
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BBC News
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After the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was expectation that constructive uses of atomic energy would follow, from nuclear power to " atomic gardening" that used radioactive substances to breed new mutant crops. In 1946, newspaper and radio stations speculated that nuclear weapons might soon safeguard us from acts of God, recounts Harper in her book Make It Rain, an account of the US government's attempts at weather control. One New York Times article asked whether atomic energy "by its explosive force" could divert hurricanes away from cities. "You know, maybe we could destroy hurricanes with nuclear bombs?" laughs Harper. (This is not a good idea, meteorologists have repeatedly clarified.) Early efforts to explore weather control were backed by veterans of the Manhattan Project, including John von Neumann and the so-called "father of the H-bomb" Edward Teller. But the most important breakthrough arrived, instead, inside a small, adapted freezer. At the research laboratory at US firm General Electric run by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Irving Langmuir, experiments had shown it might be possible to induce rain in clouds, by releasing substances that would cause supercooled water in the clouds to crystallise into snowflakes. To test this "cloud seeding" technology in the field, Langmuir's assistant dropped dry ice out of the window of a single-engine airplane into a cloud hanging over western Massachusetts in November 1946. Langmuir was watching through binoculars from the ground below as snow began to fall in autumn toward a mountain called Mount Greylock. "This is history!" he cried down the phone to reporters, according to Caesar's Last Breath: The Epic Story of the Air Around Us by Sam Kean. At a time when many dreamed they might soon "be able to choose their weather much as they chose a radio station", writes Harper, the era of weather control appeared to be startlingly close at hand. How to weaken a hurricane Although little was known at the time about hurricane structure and behaviour, the US Navy and Army agreed to collaborate with Langmuir's lab on Project Cirrus, which aimed to understand if cloud seeding technology might be able to help extinguish hurricanes at birth, divert them off-course, or else weaken deadly tropical cyclones before they hit land. Data gathered by weather balloons and aircraft indicated that hurricane clouds might contain large quantities of supercooled water, like the cloud Langmuir had seeded. During the hurricane season of 1947, on October 13, he convinced a navy crew to drop 80kg (200lb) of dry ice into an ice crusher in the belly of a B-17 bomber, sprinkling powder into a hurricane crossing Florida. This would be the historic first attempt to use this technology to modify a tropical cyclone. 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But the US military maintained a strong interest in storm modification as their involvement in the Vietnam War escalated in the 1960s, says Harper. "The Navy had a secret programme out at China Lake Naval Air Station [in California] where they were working on seeding techniques or weather-control techniques that were going to be used in Laos in Vietnam," she says. These classified missions, codenamed Operation Popeye, aimed to develop a "weather weapon" that could seed rain storms to wash out the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the North Vietnamese military supply line. For these efforts, says Harper, a civilian programme to research weather modification would provide the "perfect cover". According to Stormfury's working hypothesis, by seeding the area just outside the eye wall with silver iodide, they could cause clouds to form a second eyewall, which in turn would compete with the inner eye wall. 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On 18 and 20 August, 13 aircraft were involved in five runs across Hurricane Debbie, including a Navy A-6 Intruder jet, which dropped 1,000 silver iodide canisters each day. After nearly a decade of false starts, the data they gathered was jaw-dropping: most encouragingly, they documented a second eye wall emerging after seeding flights, with weaker winds, matching the hypothesis. During the two seeding days, winds decreased by 31% and 15%. Stormfury director R Cecil Gentry concluded that there was less than a one-in-10 chance of this happening naturally and his paper in the journal Science found that the data suggested the storm had been successfully modified by the scientists. The end of Stormfury Debbie was not the springboard to greater success that many involved in the project hoped. The last seeding flight flew in 1971, dropping canisters into the ill-defined eyewall of Hurricane Ginger with no discernible effect. Later the same year the Navy pulled support. The Navy's exit was in part because they no longer needed to test it, says Harper: "They were using the techniques in Vietnam and Laos – they didn't need to test them in the Atlantic anymore on hurricanes." Figures revealed in the Pentagon Papers in 1974 showed a far less cautious use of silver iodide and similar compounds in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, where Air Force and Navy planes dropped in a total of 47,409 canisters in 2,600 seeding missions. In total, Stormfury's seeding flights had dropped canisters of silver iodide into four hurricanes on eight different days. Data across these flights found that on four days, winds reduced, falling in wind-speed by between 10% or more. Other days, nothing happened, which was blamed on flights failing to hit targets or poorly chosen storms. With few candidate storms in the Atlantic, during the 1970s, the US attempted to strike deals with Australia and the Philippines to run further tests on storms in the Pacific Ocean, off their coastlines. "The countries in the Pacific Rim just said, no," says Harper. "Just: 'No. That's not going to happen.'" Around the time of Debbie's apparent success, the scientific basis of the project began to crumble. Images appeared to show some hurricanes spontaneously developed multiple concentric eyewalls, a phenomenon that Willoughby personally observed while flying through tropical storms with the Navy. If this was the case, Debbie's results could be mere coincidence. At the same time, research increasingly questioned whether hurricanes contained the vast clouds of supercooled water that Stormfury believed could be seeded, instead finding ice, which would be unaffected by silver iodide. "Probably [either] one would have carried the day in an objective scientific evaluation," says Willoughby. Although he had joined Stormfury with the intention of contributing to storm modification, being assigned to seeding crews, Willoughby never flew a seeding mission and found a project adrift. "Frankly, to my mind, the experiment did not seem to be well-thought-out in those later days," he says. Writing the final evaluation of the project in 1985, Willougby concluded that despite the team's determined efforts, "the expected results of seeding are often indistinguishable from naturally occurring intensity changes". Did Stormfury fail? To all involved, it was clear that Stormfury was never a normal meteorological study – instead, an experiment that began "at the wrong end", according to the Navy's project leader Pierre St Amand, quoted in Make it Rain. Because of the project's military value, and potential impact on civilian safety, Stormfury received millions of dollars in funding and support that most meteorological studies can only imagine. At the same time, hurricane science was still in its infancy, with not enough known to make accurate predictions about their interior structure and behaviour. "There was a germ of science," Harper summarises. But it's a pretty safe bet Stormfury would've remained in the lab if it weren't for military interests, she adds. Nevertheless, the project delivered results that are still keeping us safe in other ways. "The aircraft measurements taught us a lot about hurricane structure and behaviour," says Joe Golden. "And those data helped to improve the models at the time." The funding it generated for meteorology helped address these knowledge gaps. Willoughby, who is currently a research professor at Florida International University, says that since the start of Stormfury, the 24-hour forecast for hurricane's path has vastly increased in accuracy, from an error of more 120 nautical miles (138 miles/222km) to around 50 nautical miles (58 miles/93km), and forecast of hurricane intensity have improved from vague guidance to predictions accurate to within 10 knots (12mph/19km/h). Data gathered by the observer planes are still being researched, and instruments developed by Stormfury provide more accurate ways for airplanes to track hurricanes. Two highly modified P3 airplanes that were purchased for Stormfury – known affectionately as Kermit and Miss Piggy – continue to be used, some 50 years on. A future for storm modification? For some, Stormfury is unfinished work. "Stormfury was one of the most frustrating scientific experiments in my life," Golden says. "In a nutshell, I think that Noaa gave up too soon." Over the years, Golden has continued to make a case for government agencies to step up and show ambition to make hurricane modification a reality. Spurred by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, in which nearly 2,000 people died, Golden began working with the US Department of Homeland Security on "Hamp", the Hurricane Aerosol and Microphysics Program. "It was also aimed at weakening hurricanes, but it had a whole different approach. Instead of silver iodide, we were going to use very tiny salt aerosols as the seeding agent," he says. "Had the funding continued, we were going to do some field experiments – not on hurricanes initially, but just on cloud lines." "The modeling results were very, very encouraging," he says, indicating that aerosols could not only diminish a hurricane's intensity but alter its course. "That's very important: if you can steer a hurricane like Katrina away from New Orleans, think of all the lives and the property damage that you would have saved." "That had some very tantalising results but – yet again – the funding ran out," he says. Willoughby, meanwhile, feels Noaa was right to end research. "It was a beguiling idea – what's not to like about making it rain in the desert or keeping typhoons and hurricanes from wrecking cities?" he asks. "But the science didn't work out." For anyone with a theory of how to stop hurricanes, the hurdles are clear, says Willoughby. "What you do is you come up with an idea, you'd have to do a tabletop experiment or a small-scale field trial, and then use that to simulate it in a numerical model." Yet he doubts a solution will find a way to match the force of a tropical storm – even if we use nuclear weapons. Stormfury was a humbling reality check, says Willoughby, pitting humans against the "immense" energy of a hurricane – estimated to be equivalent to a 10-megatonne nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes. "Perhaps some day, somebody will come up with a way to weaken hurricanes artificially," he writes in an email. "Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could do it." -- If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week. For more science, technology, environment and health stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
The Guardian
15 hours ago
- The Guardian
Fighting the climate crisis is vital for national security
Former military leaders rightly point out that climate change is a matter of national security (UK must consider food and climate part of national security, say top ex-military figures, 29 May). What is required in response is a thoughtful, strategic approach that focuses in on actions that are practical and effective in these difficult times and will help build the UK government's 'strong foundations' of national security and secure borders. For example, arguably the biggest near-term threat to UK security is the 'mass population displacement' that Lt Gen Richard Nugee refers to. About 3.5 billion people live in an arc around Europe, across Africa, the Middle East and Asian countries such as Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. People in these regions are already confronting floods and heatwaves of up to 50C that are making large areas uninhabitable. Rural communities are being forced into conflict and migration, while food production and supplies to cities are being affected. Russia has already identified this as a strategic way to undermine European democracies. It stokes conflict and weaponises people – for example, pushing a wave of 4 million Syrian war refugees into Europe and Turkey. The payoff has been the rise of pro-Russian rightwing parties across Europe. With temperatures rising much faster than expected, this problem will accelerate during the present parliament. It requires immediate action as there's no way to contain it. What can we do? The UK has a strong track record of using international aid to promote farming in these vulnerable communities. The best approach is regenerative farming, which produces food, builds resilience to extreme weather and draws carbon out of the atmosphere as it rebuilds soil health. It is a strategy for mitigating, and adapting to, climate change. We must salvage and expand this programme within the remaining aid and climate finance budget. It is essential to our national security that we fight climate change at home, through decarbonisation, and that we promote regenerative agriculture at home and in frontline countries around Adam ParrHertford College, University of Oxford Have an opinion on anything you've read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
