Dust storms, common in arid environments, have significant impacts on human activities and health. These storms reduce visibility, disrupt traffic, and pose health risks due to airborne particles. Dust particles, including minerals, organic material, and biological components, can penetrate the respiratory tract and cause respiratory issues or deliver pathogens. Dust storms like haboobs, cause physical disruptions and have environmental effects, including long-range dust migration and fertilization of the ocean. Climate change and human activities can contribute to the frequency and intensity of dust storms.
In arid and desert environments dust storms are a common occurrence and happen when high wind entrains dust or sand from the ground. The suspended particles have a strong impact on human activities due to decreased visibility and resulting disruption of air and ground traffic and a higher incidence of accidents.
There are also potential adverse human health effects caused by the exposure to high concentrations of the particles involved. The wind entrains mostly the smaller dust particles and a substantial fraction or airborne particles in dust storms is smaller than 10 um (1/5 of a human hair) in size and can penetrate in the respiratory tract of humans. These dust particles are chemically similar to the surface dust and contain mainly mineral components but also organic material, both natural and human caused. The storms will also contain biological material such as pollens, spores, bacteria and viruses. They can cause respiratory issues or deliver pathogens to lungs.
In storms, dust particles are entrained once the wind reaches a certain critical velocity sufficient to generate the uplift. The velocity is dependent on the underlying surface material. A particularly impressive kind of dust storms are so-called haboobs. They feature a wall of dust, which can reach hundreds of meters of altitude and are common to areas of the Southwest US and the Middle East. Haboobs tend to form when there is a substantial atmospheric downdraft, like in a thunderstorm, and the high wind speeds will lift substantial material and then move along with the storm.
In dust storms there are physical impacts: the reduced visibility, a higher risk of accidents but also disruption of traffic and work activities as well as disruption of data transmission.
There are also large scale environmental impacts of dust storms. Some dust storms are so significant that the dust is lifted to high latitudes and can migrate thousands of kilometers. Hence Saharan dust storms impact both Europe and North America, sometimes yielding sand deposits thousands of kilometers away. Ecologically the input of mineral dust may have an important fertilizing effect on the ocean, where iron-rich dust deposited into the water might increase marine productivity as a sort of fertilizer, bringing in a limiting nutrient such as iron.
On Human impacts there is concern regarding the exposure, from immediate effects of stress to the respiratory system impacting people with pre-existing health conditions. Dust storms can also serve to deliver pathogens, or disease causing materials. One such hypothesis is that dust storms would facilitate the dispersal of and potential infection of people with Cocci spores, which are the causing agent of valley fever endemic in arid environments such as the US Southwest.
While dust storms are natural at any scale, they might become more current with climate change and larger arid environments.
Also some of them are aggravated by human activities. For example, crusts that form on soil and naturally prevent substantial dust entrainment can be damaged by human activity. Fallow fields or human perturbations of the ground, such as through building or agriculture, create more loose material, facilitating or aggravating dust entrainment hence storm intensity.