The Inventory of North American Dust Sources

Earth Surface Processes Team - Central Region

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History and Purpose of the Inventory

Photo of dust storm approaching Stratford, Texas, April 18, 1935.

Dust storm approaching Stratford, Texas, April 18, 1935. Photo from NOAA George E. Marsh Album.

At a workshop in Boulder, CO, held in October 2004, a group of researchers gathered to discuss emissions of dust (http://esp.cr.usgs.gov/info/dust/). One of the recommendations emerging from this workshop was the construction of a centralized database of North American dust events and the characteristics of their sources. Following on this recommendation, we planned database focusing on North America where a substantial history of data gathering exists. In the future the database may be expanded to include events from other parts of the globe where the relevant data exist. At the meeting, it was recognized that prior to that time, dust emission studies had been performed piecemeal, from the perspective of a number of disciplines from geomorphology to agricultural science to atmospheric modeling. The participants acknowledged that the mechanisms allowing distributed sources to feed into large dust events are poorly understood, in spite of a long history of plot and laboratory-scale erosion studies and a more recent record of remote sensing observations that can characterize the dust storms themselves.

This inventory gathers essential information available on dust sources and events in a variety of settings and conditions in one location for comparison. In some cases, this has enabled archival data (meteorological, satellite, etc.) to be obtained to further investigate the meteorological, vegetative, and physical surface conditions associated with a given event. The database is designed to illuminate consistent source regions and individual hot spots, as well as the conditions under which they are active. By collecting information on the landforms, vegetation cover, sediment availability, land use, hydrologic conditions, and meteorological conditions associated with dust storms, this database can be used for exploring hypotheses leading to better understanding of contemporary and future dust storms. From such understanding, predictive models of dust production can be developed for use in atmospheric models or as a risk assessment tool for regions that may become dust sources under changing land-use conditions. Although housed at the USGS, this is a community database in that the data are provided by the community and available to the scientific community for research purposes.

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