This is my post for #freewriters 2759 prompt theorist hosted by
Yesterday, I wrote a little about the Sahara dust that is moving in on Florida. Well, it is here. In the above photo, the haze under the white clouds is not fog or rain clouds, it is the dust. I know this dust comes across the ocean from Africa and moves west. It crosses the Caribbean and then moves northwest towards Florida, but I did not know where it goes after it leaves Florida or how it can travel that far without falling to the ground or water.
The dust particles are usually transported at a height of between one and three miles above the surface of the globe, meaning that they can freely travel for a long distance without settling, and without any interference from many natural landscape features. Only large-scale mountain ranges can disrupt the airflow at such a height. copied from.
https://www.geographyrealm.com/geography-of-saharan-dust-where-and-how-does-it-travel/
It gets in the air when the sun heats the ground and lifts it into the atmosphere, it can be up there from 5 to 20 thousand feet. When it crosses the Amazon basin, it can give nutrients to the land. As it comes west, it starts to sink. It can impact Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and eastern Texas. Sometimes it will go north to the Middle East and Europe, where it turns the sky orange. Here in Florida, we will get orange colored sunrises and sunsets.
Since they know all of this by tracking it on satellites, I was wondering what a theorist thought before we had satellites. Since I had no clue how they knew what it was, I googled it and found that they collected dust particles from different places. The particles had stuff like marine sediments in it, it also had leaf wax in it. I am not sure what leaf wax is or how it gets in the dust, but they studied it, and it gave them clues about past climate conditions that turned out to match the Sahara Desert. Then they studied the weather patterns and figured out that it was where the dust was coming from.
This dust can be bad for people with breathing problems, but it also has a good side. We do not get any tropical storms or hurricanes while the dust is crossing the ocean. The dust will dry out the atmosphere so storms can not develop, so it is a good thing that it is here. The bad thing is, like all good things, it does not last that long.
photo is mine