El Paso Is Having Its Dustiest Year Since the Actual Dust Bowl

If you live in El Paso, Las Cruces, or Ciudad Juárez and feel like you’ve been inhaling the Chihuahuan Desert lately, you’re not imagining things. The Borderplex region is experiencing its dustiest season since the Dust Bowl, the period of devastating dust storms that hit North America a century ago. NASA’s Aqua satellite captured an image of the airborne dust from low-Earth orbit on April 27. The swaths of airborne particles are part of an ongoing set of storms pummeling the Borderplex, the transnational area that includes southern New Mexico, West Texas, and the Mexican state of Chihuahua. The imaged storm is just the latest in a string that is yeeting dried-up lake beds and parched soil into the southern skies. This year’s drought-exacerbated dusty season is “truly exceptional—one for the record books,” said Thomas Gill, an environmental scientist at the University of Texas at El Paso, in a NASA Earth Observatory release. Gill has tracked dust activity across the planet (and the B ... Read full article.