Satellite pictures of Saharan dust clouds have been in the news all summer - they don t just impact Africa, they even impact air quality in far-away cities like Houston. Clouds of African dust often migrate across the Atlantic Ocean during summer months, affecting even U.S. air quality from mid-June through mid-September.
Symposium on Environmental Justice Held at Miles College birminghamtimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from birminghamtimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Steady improvements in ambient air quality in the USA over the past several decades, in part a result of public policy1,2, have led to public health benefits1–4. However, recent trends in ambient concentrations of particulate matter with diameters less than 2.5 μm (PM2.5), a pollutant regulated under the Clean Air Act1, have stagnated or begun to reverse throughout much of the USA5. Here we use a combination of ground- and satellite-based air pollution data from 2000 to 2022 to quantify the contribution of wildfire smoke to these PM2.5 trends. We find that since at least 2016, wildfire smoke has influenced trends in average annual PM2.5 concentrations in nearly three-quarters of states in the contiguous USA, eroding about 25% of previous multi-decadal progress in reducing PM2.5 concentrations on average in those states, equivalent to 4 years of air quality progress, and more than 50% in many western states. Smoke influence on trends in the numbe
West Texas is known to be dusty. Dust storms sometimes march across the West Texas countryside like an unrelenting army. The effects of dust can be devastating.