Report Details the Widespread Impacts of Dust on California

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Researchers from several University of California campuses have collaborated to create a report on dust in California, a characteristic that defines the desert climate zone that encompasses most of the state.

The regions where dust storms occur encompass an area greater than 55,000 square miles and are home to nearly five million Californians, a population greater than nearly half of the states in the United States.

And now more than ever, there is a great need for the public to know about it, say members of the science team led by Amato Evan, a climate scientist at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. One major finding from the research compiled in this report is the wide-ranging impacts of dust on health, public safety, the environment, and the economy of California.

For example, dust can be laced with industrial chemicals and have the potential to cause severe respiratory illness or death, and reductions in visibility during dust storms result in significant traffic accidents. Dust storms reduce agricultural productivity from the loss of fertile topsoil and the abrasion of crops by these airborne particles, which is particularly critical given the state’s role as the leading agricultural producer in the United States.

“Dust can seriously affect people's health, causing problems like asthma, Valley fever, and heart issues,” said study co-author Alexandria Heaney, a climate and health epidemiologist at UC San Diego’s Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity. “In California, we're seeing more dust because of drought, climate change, and land use changes, but most of what we know about how dust harms health comes from studies in other regions of the world, like Asia and Africa. We really need more research here in California to understand how dust is affecting our communities and how we can best protect vulnerable individuals.”

When blowing dust settles on solar panels, the ability to generate electricity from the sun is diminished, which hampers the ability of the state to transition to renewable sources of energy. Dust whipped up from the state’s arid regions during the winter and spring can settle on the snow covering the Sierras. This causes a darkening of the snowpack and encourages melting earlier in the year than would otherwise be the case, negatively impacting the state’s critical water resources.

Report authors, who represent seven of the 10 UC campuses, are hoping their work yields more support from state and local governments to help impacted communities minimize their exposure to dust by generating timely and accurate forecasts of dust, and characterize what people might be breathing in when it is aloft in the sky.

“We want to get our legislators to take the increase in dust pollution more seriously,” said UC Merced Professor Adeyemi Adebiyi, who studies processes of dust transport and emission and the myriad impacts of dust. “California, particularly the Central Valley, has not been considered an important dust source. However, we're beginning to see, with recent events, that the Central Valley is a major contributor, and much of its dust comes from agricultural sources.”