Dust Storms

Dust storms are a scourge of modern life in much of the world.

In order to produce a dust storm

you need wind and you need soil particles.

Get off the road!

We look at what a dust storm is.

The dust storm is actually when the visibility is less than a kilometre.

And how human activity is making them worse.

We focus on the Middle East...

About to be engulfed!

..one of the world's worst-hit areas.

During the dust-storm season,

patients get severe attacks of asthma

that require hospital admission and intensive care.

We'll see how NASA's satellites can track dust storms

as they sweep across the Earth.

The dust can be lifted up to three or four miles in altitude

before it's really, kind of, carried away by the winds.

Every year, the current estimate is anywhere

from two to five billion metric tonnes.

It moves around some distance in the Earth's atmosphere every year.

So it's quite a bit of dust.

Dust isn't always bad.

Scientists are researching the impact of dust

crossing the ocean from Africa to Florida.

I think the fact that we can see these impacts so far away

is really exciting.

So in the rainforest, many of the plants derive their nutrients

and are fertilised from dust.

In Kuwait, they are pioneering new ways

of tackling the problem of dust storms...

This plant can reduce the negative effect of dust.

..while technology brings the prospect

of daily dust-storm forecasts.

So this is the sand dust storm warning and assessment system

for Northern Africa, Middle East and Europe.

As the world's climate becomes more extreme,

scientists are urging action.

It is the number-one killer,

the number-one non-communicable disease

that we are trying to tackle today.

If it's coming your way, it's a case of, are you going to be suffocated?

Oh, my God, this is crazy!

Wow.

Dust storms are frightening and dangerous.

They can occur without warning,

bringing transport to a standstill and disrupting daily life.

Uh-oh. About to be engulfed!

Dust can make people sick and it can kill.

Sand and dust are generated in dry regions across the world

but the greatest source is the Sahara Desert.

The Sahara probably produces round about a half,

something of that order, of the Earth's dust.

And the reason it's there is because there's an old lake,

that was there when conditions were wetter, that's dried up.

And it's the material from the floor of that old lake,

silt and little silica organisms called diatoms,

that get blown away, high up into the air,

and can travel huge distances.

There's a range of countries, primarily neighbouring the Sahara,

because this is the major source of sand and dust storms,

both to the north and south, but equally to the east,

where we're talking of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Kuwait, the Emirates,

the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia.

But increasingly, moving to the east, we run into the Stans,

as we call them, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan,

and here the difficulty is that they're affected in both directions,

sand and dust being driven to the south from the Gobi Desert,

from the Tibetan Plateau and all through Asia.

So there's a whole range of countries with a long plume,

starting from the western edge of the Sahara,

all the way through and up to China.

Dust has been blowing around the world for millennia.

Dust storms are a natural phenomenon,

but the world is getting hotter and, in many places, drier.

Scientists see clear evidence that human activity

is making dust storms worse.

The science behind dust storms is fascinating.

We think that 20% to 25% could be attributed to human activity.

So, something called the Dust Bowl Syndrome,

which is associated with poor land management, where the topsoil

becomes aerosolised, like tiny, tiny, little aerosols,

which means that the slightest amount of energy or wind

can lift up the soil and effectively take those topsoils

many thousands of kilometres.

-ARCHIVE:

-'Clouds, rolling seas of anger move across vast territories

'and drop their tragic burden of burning dust.'

We had a big phenomenon, or tragedy,

called The Dust Bowl of the United States in the 1930s.

The American Dust Bowl is famous as a human-induced

environmental disaster.

In the 1920s and '30s,

crops were planted on newly created farms on former grasslands

but drought and over-farming on poor soils

meant the crops failed year after year.

With no vegetation, thousands of tonnes of soil blew away,

creating choking storms of dust for days on end.

How did it happen?

Some unusually wet period made people think that water is available

and you can plough anywhere you like and water would follow,

and this was the dominant thinking.

The Dust Bowl, primarily, was due to a drop in rainfall in the area.

At the same time, the human population was migrating

and using that area for agricultural purposes.

And they were doing strip farming of the topsoils

and then leaving them exposed.

Farms were abandoned

and people were forced to leave their homes for good.

And the dust storms got so bad because of that,

it drove legislation in 1935 to pass the Soil Conservation Act

that Congress passed.

And that prohibited that type of farming.

A big driver of why the severity of the dust storms dropped over time

was because it started raining again.

The Americans instituted various things

like shelter belts and windbreaks,

which really dampened down the dust-storm activity

in the 1940s and onwards

and that does show that we can do something about it if we wish,

in the right circumstances.

Today, the Middle East is one of the areas worst affected by dust storms.

It's in the path of sand and dust blowing from the Sahara,

but the region itself

is increasingly becoming a source of dust.

Decreasing rainfall combined with the overuse of water for agriculture

are making the soil dangerously dry.

Why don't we get dust storms any time we have wind?

Because we have a higher soil moisture.

So soil moisture acts like a glue, it keeps these soil particles

connected to each other, so the wind cannot lift them.

As soon as you lose the moisture, you disconnect these particles

and these particles are blown away easily whenever you have wind,

so when you have a drought, when you have stronger winds

and when you lose your soil moisture, you have a dust storm.

PANICKED VOICES

We have seen, in the Middle East and North Africa,

more and more frequent dust storms and one of the reasons

is that water resources in the region have become more scarce.

Human intervention is one of the major reasons for this scarcity.

Until 30 years ago, the marshlands of southern Iraq look like this.

The marshes occupied 15,000 square kilometres

between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

The wetlands were deliberately drained

by former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

They were partly restored but are now again threatened

by the diversion of water for agriculture and the oil industry.

Satellite maps show a gradual drying of the land over the past 15 years.

Nations the world over see the control of water

as key to growth and prosperity.

Middle Eastern countries have ambitious programmes

to build dams and water pipelines for drinking water,

crop irrigation and hydroelectric power.

Turkey has had a massive long-term project

to harness the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which start in Turkey

and flow through neighbouring Syria and Iraq.

The Ataturk Dam, completed in 1992, and a source of huge national pride,

is one of the largest in the world.

One-third of the Euphrates' former flow is now diverted for irrigation.

Turkey's latest project is the Ilisu Dam on the River Tigris.

When completed, it will submerge the ancient city of Hasankeyf,

whose history goes back 12,000 years.

Once, people travelled on the Tigris

from here to Nineveh, Mosul and Babylon.

There are international agreements promising Syria and Iraq

a minimum amount of water,

but, inevitably, the volume of water flowing downstream

will be decreased.

Most of this water goes into agriculture,

so we want to irrigate and produce food in a dry area.

So the amount of water we have in the Middle East

is enough for satisfying our drinking and sanitation needs.

It's not enough to produce food with it

or make the region self-sufficient in food production,

but this is something that the region has not understood well.

Now, if you dry your soil,

if you use a lot of water and waste a lot of water,

then you should expect a punishment, which is called a dust storm,

and that's something we have been punished for in the Middle East

because of not using our water properly,

because of losing soil moisture.

One example of the consequences of poor water management

is Lake Urmia in Iran.

The lake, the largest in the Middle East,

once supported wildlife and a tourist industry.

With no outflow, its water became many times saltier than the oceans.

Since the completion of dams restricting the inflow of water,

Lake Urmia has shrunk dramatically.

Lake Urmia is a good example of a modern environmental tragedy

that was created by humans.

We had a salt lake, which was one of the largest in the world.

The dominant thinking was that rivers are flowing into the lake,

this terminal lake, which has no effect, the water gets salty,

let's use the water for a good purpose.

Let's use it for farming, let's use it for the urban areas.

What happened was that the lake got smaller

and it becomes a big disaster that the whole region

has been affected by and now a lot of investment should be made

in order to restore the lake, if that is not only a dream.

Sediments are very fine soils and once they dry out,

they're easily mobilised into the atmosphere

and some of the dustiest regions on the planet

are usually due to dry lake beds. A good example, the United States.

In the early 20th century,

the city of Los Angeles tapped Lake Owens as a source for drinking water

and a short time later that lake was dry, or almost totally dry,

and to this day that is the number-one source of dust

in the atmosphere in North America.

Kuwait.

This city lives under the shadow of dust storms, with around 21 a year.

In summer, almost every day, people are breathing in dusty air.

Kuwait is in the main pathway of winds bringing dust.

It blows in from the Sahara in the west

and, in summer, the shamal winds from the north-west

bring dust from Syria and Iraq.

It is one of the worst, in fact, in the region.

Most of the trajectories of dust storms are passing through Kuwait.

Dr Ali al-Dousari's research team know all about dust

from first-hand experience.

Dust builds up on cars and windows and on other surfaces

such as solar panels.

And it's getting worse.

Inhaling all this dust has serious consequences.

They have a great impact on human health.

It's very bad for you to breathe in fine silica dust.

It carries allergens which can, you know, be fungal spores or bacteria,

which can affect you

and cause hospital admissions or even death.

Dr Ahmed al-Khabaz is an allergy specialist

and consultant at the Kuwait Child and Allergy Clinic.

Most of his patients suffer from the effects of dust and air pollution.

Dust affects all people, irregard of their genetic predisposition.

When you think about the air in Kuwait,

the air in Kuwait is full of dust

as well as chemicals that come from the oil industry,

as well as pollution from cars.

At the same time, you have a lot of pollen in that air,

so, if you like, you can say you have a cocktail of chemicals

into that air.

Almost one in five of Kuwait's residents suffer from asthma.

People live with the condition year round,

but doctors see a spike in admissions

when the dust storms arrive.

During the dust-storm season,

the number of patients visiting our clinic

increases to double the usual day.

And some of them, they get severe attacks

that requires hospital admission and intensive care.

Kuwait resident Mokhtar al-Hijrah,

has suffered from dust-related asthma for 15 years.

TRANSLATION:

But it's hard to escape the dust, even inside.

Resident Khalid Al Ameri

shows some of the measures Kuwaitis use

to try to prevent dust particles getting into their homes.

Countries across the world see an increase in hospital admissions

because of respiratory problems.

The very young and the very old are particularly vulnerable.

For them, poor air quality can be life-threatening.

With nearly seven million people dying prematurely

because of air quality, much of which is a complex mixture

of dust that has got pollutants carried with it,

means that it is the number-one killer,

the number-one non-communicable disease

that we are trying to tackle today.

Back in Kuwait, Dr al-Dousari's team collect dust for analysis

from nearly 50 sites across the country.

Dust is complex material.

Its chemical and mineral composition varies

depending on where it comes from.

These variations have a bearing on its health impact.

The size of dust particles is key in assessing their impact on health.

The Kuwaiti scientists measure the size range

by looking at the light scattered

when a laser beam is shone through the sample.

The size of the particle is very important

in causing respiratory problems.

85% of dust size in Kuwait is ten micrometres

and that's the size that usually cause respiratory complaints

and exacerbation of asthma.

When we breathe in dust, particles smaller than ten micrometres,

the PM 10 particles, become lodged in the lungs,

causing breathing difficulties.

Even smaller particles, PM 2.5,

can actually cross directly into our bloodstream.

The small particles, they interfere with the gas exchange of the lung

and result into severe respiratory diseases.

Scientists at institutions across the world

are doing further tests that add to the analysis.

Claire Corkhill is a mineralogist at the University of Sheffield

in the UK.

She leads a laboratory studying soil and dust particles.

What we're looking at now is the dust

under a scanning electron microscope

and at the moment we're magnified by 300 times.

So the scale bar on this image is 50 microns across

and so these particles are really, really very small.

We have some individual ones but they also agglomerate all together

in big clumps.

So you can see there's a whole different distribution of sizes,

some of them very small and some of them a lot larger.

With another technique, X-ray diffraction,

Claire can tell what mineral types are present in the dust sample.

Minerals are highly structured and different ones

can have different effects when we breathe them in.

So this is the diffraction pattern from the dust sample

and what we've been able to identify are four different phases

and these are gypsum, which is calcium sulphate,

there's also calcite, which is calcium carbonate,

there is quartz, which is probably

the main phase that's present in this material,

and also a very small amount of a type of mica called muscovite,

which is a clay material.

Quartz in dust can be in the form of tiny, sharp crystals,

which can cause severe irritation.

Quartz is responsible for upregulation

of the inflammatory cells in the respiratory system.

Aluminium and magnesium in the dust

are responsible for causing mucus irritation

in the upper and lower airways.

The dust isn't purely mineral.

Sticking to these dust particles there may be material

such as pollen and bacteria.

Studies show that these contaminants can make breathing problems worse.

Well, you go out into the desert and you look at...

you see a lot of dirt in topsoil

and you don't see any growth.

No trees, no brush, no anything, and you think it's sterile.

Well, it's not, even in the most inhabitable regions,

if you reach down and pick between your index finger and your thumb,

that would be about a gram of topsoil,

you would have anywhere from 10,000 to a billion bacterial cells.

Dust is clearly a major hazard,

so there's an urgent need to understand the behaviour

of dust storms to help people cope with their impact.

Three, two, one.

Main engines start and liftoff.

One of the best ways to study dust storms

is by satellites orbiting the Earth.

People didn't understand the intensity

and how far these storms could move until we had satellite imagery.

NASA has over 20 Earth-observing satellites

that are monitoring constantly

different components of the energy and water and carbon cycles.

Using satellites, we're able to get a global picture of the land surface

and different components of the land surface.

For example, you can monitor the type and amount of vegetation.

In addition, you can also tell how wet the soil is by using microwaves.

So if you know how wet the surface is,

then you have a better idea of the intensity and duration

and locations of potential dust storms.

NASA's Goddard Space Center is the largest organisation in the world

monitoring the Earth, the solar system and the universe.

10,000 people work here

and several hundred scientists specialise in looking at the Earth.

With the information satellites gather from land, sea and air,

scientists build computer models

that help them simulate past and future conditions.

Dr Peter Colarco is one of the team

studying particles in the atmosphere.

So this is an animation from a global earth system model

that we run here at NASA.

What we're simulating in this are the distributions

of what we call aerosols, or particles in the atmosphere.

And the different colours represent different kinds of these particles

and they come from all kinds of different sources.

So the blue colours are from sea spray

that's blown up by the winds at the surface of the sea.

The greener colours come from smoke sources,

so there we have individual fires that are going off in the model

and emitting smoke into the atmosphere

and it's transported over long distances.

The whiter colours correspond to what we would call

anthropogenic pollutants,

so things that come from power plants or car emissions

and so you can see places, especially in China

or on the east coast of the United States

or even in Europe, where a lot of these pollutants

are emitted and transported.

And finally, the redder colours that we have correspond to dust storms

and so in that case, what we're looking at

is the effect of the surface winds blowing across a region

that has a lot of fine particles that can be blown up into the air

and blown by the winds over very long distances.

Using models like this helps scientists understand

what's happening in the Earth's atmosphere.

Other projects concentrate on collecting actual data

about atmospheric particles.

Dr Robert Levy has been working on a long-term global aerosol record.

So this is a time series from the MODIS Terra satellite.

We're trying to create global observations of aerosol.

These are not models, these are based on camera-like images.

How it works is satellites measure light reflected from the Earth

and you can see that there are places on the globe

where you see lots of aerosol, which is the bright orange colour.

And you can see the hot spots around the globe,

you see the dust in Africa, biomass burning in the Amazon.

What we don't have from the satellite

is exactly what it's made out of.

You can get a sense of what kind it is, if it's dust, smoke, pollution.

One place that you do see, at least in the 15-year record we have,

is there seems to be an increase in the Middle East,

along the Arabian Peninsula, in that region,

and it seems to be a significant increase.

NASA's studies back up what people on the ground

can see for themselves.

Oh, look at that! Look at that!

These satellite studies are now being put to practical use.

Look at that!

NASA shares its data with other research groups

who are developing a global sand and dust storm early warning system.

This former church in the Spanish city of Barcelona

is now a world centre for science.

The interior is taken up by the massive MareNostrum 3 supercomputer,

used by research scientists across the world.

One project is to predict dust storms,

in this case for Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

Other centres in China, Japan and Korea cover the Asia region

and the aim, ultimately, is to alert people

when a dust storm is expected.

The role of the Barcelona supercomputer centre

is to provide every day forecasts of sand and dust storms

over North Africa, Middle East and Europe.

The dust storm or the dust forecasting

is very similar to a weather forecast.

Precipitation, but also the wind regimes, right,

you know, based on different meteorological scenarios.

If you have more wind or less wind,

you're going to have more or less dust depending on these anomalies.

Basically, what we're producing now are three-day forecasts.

This is a forecast from the Barcelona group

for three days in June 2016.

The high concentrations are yellow and brown

but the resolution and accuracy aren't yet up to the standard

or detail of weather forecasts.

Probably, and this is what's going to probably happen in the future,

we're going to have probabilistic forecasting,

so we're going to have an ensemble of forecasts

with different regional conditions at very high resolution

and we will be able to provide a probabilistic forecast

as this is happening now for weather forecasting for precipitation.

For example, you have seen that we have a 30% chance

of precipitation in this area, or a 70% chance,

so that's the idea also with dust storms in the future,

particularly the storms that are really very difficult to capture,

which are the finer scale, but that can be particularly intense.

In fact, our dust forecast requires even more computing time

than a weather forecast would require.

It's only by having a machine like the one we have behind us

that we can afford to perform the best dust forecasts

and not only the dust forecasts themselves, but the archiving

and the management of the data that's being produced,

which is in the order of gigabytes of data every single day.

The Barcelona and NASA scientists know their forecasts

would be helped if they had better local data

from the countries concerned.

Of course, the other thing that we need to bring in

is more data that comes from the ground

that will help us refine things like the maps that we use

for our dust sources and even have them evolving over time

by including some information about vegetation and economics

and how that will influence things like dust sources.

War makes data collection impossible.

Conflicts in Iraq and, more recently, Syria,

have actually worsened the problem of dust storms.

And the energies of the people are consumed by conflict and survival.

The problem that we have in our region is the conflicts,

the instability and the ongoing violence and terrorism.

And that is aggravating the situation.

Unfortunately, a lot of the tracked vehicles

and the driving over the desert surface by the combatants

has disturbed the desert surface and made it worse.

The effect of war activities, especially in Iraq and Syria,

caused a huge amount of vegetation to have been destroyed.

I'm talking about native vegetation,

which make new sources of dust, never there in the past.

If we have a dust storm generated in a place like Syria and Iraq,

it is very different from a dust storm which is generated

from a place like Oman or UAE

because in places like Iraq and Syria,

we have had conflicts for years,

so we have toxic elements which could be attached to the surface.

Dust moves many thousands of kilometres and, in moving,

picks up all kinds of what we would call legacy chemicals.

It could be depleted uranium, it could be pesticides,

it could be hazardous chemicals, heavy metals, contaminants.

And the dust itself becomes like a small nucleus.

It attracts and sticks together and brings pollutants together.

So as those big areas of dust get lifted and moved,

they become part of the ambient air quality problems

that many cities have.

Scientists have also observed an increase in temperature

in the Middle East over the past 80 years.

And over the same period, a decrease in rainfall.

Even before the wars, these conditions were damaging,

particularly for agriculture.

Many farmers abandoned lands, particularly in Syria,

and, erm...those farmers went to the cities,

so there's a lot of land abandoned there as well.

This creates wind erosion.

What we had before is agricultural fields.

These are now exposed to wind erosion.

Syria wasn't before a source area.

Now it's a huge area of dust.

Also, the area between Zagros Mountains and Tigris River,

we found a huge amount because this was affected by war activities,

multiple war activities.

So drained farms and abandoned farms

became a huge source of dust, in fact, from this region.

Once the land is dried up, any sort of wind,

any strong wind in dry times

can blow the dust particles,

so people in Khuzestan now have one-third of their days a year dusty

and, you know, living in those areas is not pleasant any more.

The city of Ahvaz in Khuzestan, southwestern Iran,

is now one of the most polluted cities on the planet,

partly because of dust blowing in from Iraq.

We've been witnessing a steady increase

in the number of incidences

but also in the intensity of dust storms,

maybe in the past two decades.

And so it's not only affecting our border cities but now, sometimes,

the dust storms are moving ahead into the capital, Tehran.

On June 2nd, 2014,

Tehran was hit by a spectacular dust storm.

CAR ALARMS

Five people were killed and 30 injured.

Flights were cancelled, there were numerous car accidents

and the city was plunged into darkness.

When this happens in a nation's capital, people take notice.

As well as the social impact,

the economic cost of events like this is devastating.

Economists calculate that dust storms cost the Middle East

and North Africa around 12 billion US dollars every year.

So there's a pressing need for practical remedies.

One of the first priorities is to tackle desertification.

In Kuwait, Ali al-Dousari's team are experimenting

with native desert plants to try to stabilise the soil.

These drought-tolerant plants have extensive root systems,

which help prevent soil from blowing away.

This is Al-Liah area.

It was a quarry area in the past in Kuwait.

Quarrying was prohibited in Kuwait in 2003.

So all the quarries was dumped

and zero vegetation was in this area before.

Now the area is rehabilitated again by using native plants

in order to form a very good native life in the region.

We planted about 110,000 native plants in the area.

These native plants capture a huge amount of dust and sand

around the plant.

It wasn't there before so this kind of sediment

is formed by the dust and sand transported by wind.

It contains a lot of nutrients.

It reaches up to 9% of organic matter inside it.

Native plants is a major solution, in fact.

Let's give an example, Haloxylon salicornicum as a plant.

It can control up to 10 cubic metres of sand and dust.

This is a single plant. What if it's thousands of plants?

Satellite data can also play a role

in improving land and water management.

In 2015, NASA launched a new satellite.

The satellite makes direct measurements of the soil moisture

every few days.

If you understand how much water's in the land surface,

that can really help you forecasting and monitoring droughts and floods.

What we're seeing here, the red and yellow colours

represent precipitation and the orange and blue colours

are the changes in soil moisture from the average.

Blue colours represent wetter areas

and red colours represent drier areas.

So if you have a direct observation of the amount of moisture

in the land surface and you can improve your understanding

of the amount of moisture in the root zone,

that's a very, very important variable

for improving your understanding of crops.

NASA hopes that when this information

is made available to farmers,

it will improve land management, reducing the need for irrigation.

For people living in dust-storm areas, new technology could help.

Nowadays it's possible to check the dust forecasts online.

These forecasts from the Barcelona website

are part of the global early warning system.

They're updated daily.

It provides a map with details of dust concentration

in the Middle East and North Africa.

If we zoom in around Syria and southern part of Iran,

we see a high concentration of dust.

The yellow colour shows higher concentration,

the dark brown is very high concentration of dust,

which is beyond, well beyond WHO limits,

so you would see what happens every hour in the next 72 hours.

The forecasts are becoming ever more accurate.

In future, they could help airports,

schools and emergency services to plan ahead.

Atmospheric dust has always been with us and there are some benefits.

There's some very positive impacts from dust storms

blowing around the planet.

Many of the soils in the Caribbean islands,

the clays came from North Africa

and enabled the pre-Columbian Indians to build clay pottery.

And without that dust blowing across and building up in the soils,

the clay wouldn't be in the Caribbean. You wouldn't find it.

Dust also contains valuable nutrients for plants.

So in the rainforest, from North Africa, the dust blows over,

it goes into South America during the northern hemisphere's winter

and moves down in there and many of the plants derive their nutrients

and are fertilised from dust.

And the same with Asian dust blowing across,

fertilises some of northern Hawaiian islands' rainforests

and sustains them, so there is some very positive things.

Scientists in America are investigating the effect

of Saharan dust, which blows across the Atlantic every summer.

Dr Erin Lipp's team are looking at whether this dust has an impact,

good or bad, on the coral reefs off the coast of Florida.

The dust that we see in south Florida is from the Saharan region

and, really, July and August is the peak time

when we tend to see dust events.

Typically it will look like a hazy day

and to somebody who doesn't know that there's dust in the air

or isn't thinking about it, they'll just say, "It's a hazy day."

But you can tell

and if you're collecting aerosol samples on filters,

you can actually see that your filters start turning orange

during dust events.

Each summer, the scientists return to the same coral reefs

to study the health of the coral.

They've seen worrying changes.

The economy of the Florida Keys

is almost entirely based on having a healthy coral reef.

Whether it's because commercial or recreational fishers

are going out to the reef and that's where the fish stocks are

or because of diving

and having a picturesque place to be in the water,

we've seen a very large decline in the corals over the last 20 years.

They're not in a particularly good state right now.

The dust might be involved in the deterioration.

It's a hypothesis that we have.

So we're looking at changes in water chemistry.

As the dust is deposited, we're looking at changes

in the amount of trace metals that are there, especially iron,

which is very limiting in marine waters

and there's a lot of organisms that require iron to grow.

The Saharan dust contains iron

and this iron stimulates an explosion in bacterial populations.

The team wants to know

if this contributes to the damage to the coral.

It's a complex picture and it's not yet clear.

I grew up in South Florida and it was quite common in news reports

for the weather forecast to say,

"There's Saharan dust and there's going to be beautiful sunsets."

That was my image of Saharan dust.

So I think there may be a particular draw.

It's a unique aspect that people don't necessarily think of here

and it makes for very picturesque views when you're on the water.

Science can play a part in understanding,

predicting and preventing dust storms.

This knowledge then needs to be used by policymakers.

We are very good in developing technologies,

launching satellites and doing things, but when it comes to policy,

many times we act stupidly, we become stupid,

we don't understand the realities on the ground

or we don't care about the long-term consequences of our policy.

Very, very clearly, desertification is something we need to tackle

at a very local level and it's mundane things - planting trees,

using proper irrigation, making sure that we have a vegetative cover -

that avoids the aerosolisation of the topsoil.

Of course, dust is a natural phenomenon,

it's always going to be there.

You're going to have natural desert, it's going to blow up dust,

it's going to transport this dust toward different regions,

but we can do a lot with land-conservation practices.

They still have some dust storms in the US, but not of that size

because they have better land-management practices.

The same has to happen in the Middle East.

PEOPLE SHOUT

This is a multinational problem and needs a multinational solution,

so the countries in the region have to come together

and solve this problem.

Dust storms are part of a wider environmental problem.

The wars and conflicts of the region will eventually be over.

When they are, the environmental problems won't have gone away.