Is African Dust Keeping The Hurricane Season Calm?

Wind shears, water vapor and temperature, El Nino and La Nina all play a role in the formation of hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean.

This year, the Sahara Desert appears to have played a part as well.

The vast desert that stretches across North Africa spat out a massive plume of dust in a June wind storm that blew particles over the eastern Atlantic Ocean, blanketing the cauldron where tropical storms and hurricanes bubble up.

Some scientists and meteorologists credit the dust particles and the drying effect they create with impeding the formation of tropical cyclones and creating one of the calmest Atlantic hurricane seasons in decades. The season is mostly over, but only two hurricanes have formed, both of them minor.

Exactly why forecasters were so dramatically wrong -- most of the major hurricane prognosticators predicted an above-average season -- is the subject of much speculation in the hurricane-predicting community.

Part of the mystery is that sand from the Sahara blowing over the Atlantic is far from unusual. The pattern traditionally grows stronger in the early summer and into July, said Jason Dunion, a hurricane research analyst who works for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory in Miami.

But this year's June plume was exceptional, he said, and that translated into unusually dry air in the part of the Atlantic that is the main breeding ground for hurricanes. Such levels of dryness have not been since the mid-1980s, he said.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/23/dust-hurricanes_n_4147728.html?utm_hp_ref=extreme-weather