You may experience weather as a local phenomenon, but changes hundreds or thousands of miles away can impact the weather in your hometown. A new study finds that hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico might be weakened by dust blowing in from the Sahara Desert.

In a study published in the Journal of Climate, a group of researchers calculated the effects of sand and dust from the Sahara on ocean temperatures and weather patterns. Dust from the Sahara routinely blows across the Atlantic Ocean, and much of it ends up in the Gulf of Mexico. In a NASA simulation from last year much of that dust can be clearly seen.

That dust does more than just wash up on shore at beaches; it also blocks sunlight, cooling the oceans beneath it considerably. Cooler oceans mean less energetic ocean currents, which means less powerful hurricanes. In addition, the dust particles themselves—the ones blocking sunlight from reaching the oceans—tend to heat up, leading to a warmer upper atmosphere and milder weather patterns.

That’s good news for residents of the Gulf of Mexico, where many people are still recovering from last year’s devastating hurricane season. It also provides a possible solution to reduce the impact of hurricanes in the future. People have been proposing atmospheric seeding for years, and this is evidence that the process works.

The basic idea behind atmospheric seeding is to fill the atmosphere with particles similar to the natural sand particles from the Sahara to cool the atmosphere and moderate hurricanes and other storms. It’s an idea that has some merit, but previous research has found that such a plan could have unintended side effects.

Just as conditions in the Sahara Desert can affect how hurricanes form in the Gulf of Mexico, researchers found that atmospheric seeding in the Gulf can trigger droughts in the Sahara. Again, weather isn’t just a local phenomenon, and even small changes in one part of the world can have wide-reaching effects thousands of miles away.

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