Researchers are finding that Saharan dust storms containing tiny specks of dust are linked to suppressed hurricane activity in the Atlantic.
Jason Dunion, a hurricane researcher at the NOAA Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory's Hurricane Research Division in Miami, Fla., and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studied the past 25 years of satellite data. They found that during times of intense hurricane activity, the large clouds of dust that periodically blow westward from the Saharan Desert are relatively scarce.