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Discovery News
A little
bit of China is now coursing over North America, creating
smoke-like hazes over vast areas. A gigantic dust storm
in the Gobi Desert began in early April and has caused yellow-brown
dust to lift off and take flight eastward over the Pacific
Ocean. Last week the first wave of dust struck the Pacific
coast of North America, reducing visibility to just a few
miles on what would otherwise have been sunny, clear spring
days. "The Asian dust over different parts of North
America was quite impressive over the past few days,"
said dust watcher Rudy Husar of Washington University in
St. Louis. So thick was the dust over Easter weekend that
visitors to western U.S. national parks have reportedly
been asking rangers where the "fire" is.
Normally
only smoke from major fires causes such haze. As of Wednesday,
April 18, the dust had reached the Great Lakes Region. More
dust is on the way as the Gobi dust storm continues. Scientists
have been tracking the dust, or "aerosols," with
at least three different satellites, including the GOES
8/10 weather satellites, the NASA Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer
and the NASA SeaWiFS ocean color sensor on the commercial
Seastar satellite. Contained in the dust are also manmade
pollutants, said Douglas Westphal of the Naval Research
Laboratory in Monterey, Calif.
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