From the Dust Bowl to the Sahel
By Laurie J. Schmidt
A severe drought combined with poor soil conservation practices can lead to extreme topsoil erosion, with devastating effects on the land. This is just what happened in the Great Plains region of the U.S. during the 1930s Dust Bowl years.

Dust storm over the Canary Islands.

A dust storm that originated near the Mongolia-China border on April 10, 2001, made its way across the Pacific to the U.S., sprawling from Canada to the Southwest and as far east as the Great Lakes. Although Asian dust storms occur every year, a drought in China and Mongolia, along with abnormally strong winds, provided ideal conditions for global dust travel in 2001.

Fires (shown as red dots) smoulder throughout the Sahel, March 2, 2001.
Desertification occurs when land surfaces are transformed by human activities, including overgrazing, deforestation, surface land mining, and poor irrigation techniques, during a natural time of drought. Desertification in the Sahel can largely be attributed to greatly increased numbers of humans and their grazing cattle.

West Sahel countries appear in yellow. (Image courtesy of the Africa Data Dissemination Service from the USGS).
Although the relationship between drought and human influences is complex, desertification can be successfully mitigated if financial resources are available. But exploding population growth in developing African nations means that pressures on the land there will continue to intensify.

A wall of dust approaches a Kansas town, as shown in "Effect of Dust Storms on Health," U.S. Public Health Service, Reprint No. 1707 from the Public Health Reports 50(40) October 4, 1935. (Image courtesy of the NOAA Photo Library).
Dregne, H.E. 1986. Desertification of arid lands. Physics of Desertification. http://www.ciesin.org/docs/002-193/002-193.html. Accessed April 19, 2001.
Koohafkan, A.P. 1996. Desertification, drought and their consequences. SD Dimensions. http://www.fao.org/docrep/x5317e/x5317e01.htm. Accessed April 19, 2001.
For more information
NASA Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC)
Droughts Aggravated by Dust in the Wind News Release from the NASA Earth Observatory
Drought from the NASA Earth Observatory
About the remote sensing data used | ||
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Sensors | Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) |
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Parameter | drought and desertification |
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DAAC | NASA Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC) |
SeaWiFS and TOMS data products are distributed through GES DISC.
Page Last Updated: Jul 22, 2020 at 11:50 AM EDT