Collaborative Research: Assessing current and future dust flux from the Northern Great Plains, U.S. with extreme climate variability and insights from the 1930s Dust Bowl drought

Dust storms rarely happen in the Northern Great Plains today, but a dust storm in 2022 could illustrate future storms under intense drought conditions. The last time extensive drought and dust storms plagued the Northern Great Plains was during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Previous research on the Dust Bowl focused primarily on the Southern Great Plains, while this research seeks to explore if the types of dust sources and dust emission processes in the Northern Great Plains are similar to those of the Southern Great Plains.

For example, in the 1930s cultivated cropland may have been the primary dust source in the north, whereas cultivated cropland and drought-degraded grasslands were sources in the south. The team will collect weather data and drought indicators from state archives and analyze early aerial photographs to document drought locations in the Northern Great Plains during the 1930s.

Using a portable wind tunnel, they will measure the potential of agricultural soils to erode by the wind, such as what occurred during drought conditions in 2022. The dust emission data will be used with land use and agricultural crop data to model present and future dust emissions in the Northern Great Plains. Understanding drought and wind erosion potential in a changing climate is critically important in the Great Plains where agriculture is an economic driver.

Extensive drought and dust storms, like those during the 1930s Dust Bowl, can have local, regional, and global effects. The broader impacts of this work will include development of a curriculum that underscores the importance of drought, climate change, and wind erosion on soil health. These teaching materials will be implemented in rural schools and institutions serving Native American students.

This collaborative research will also provide research opportunities to two early-career researchers, an undergraduate and two graduate students.

This research will evaluate drought and dust emission potential in the Northern Great Plains, an area that was devastated by the 1930s Dust Bowl, and predict landscape response to future extensive drought. Dust emission processes and soil characteristics, and meteorological variables will be compared to areas equally devastated by drought in the Southern Great Plains.

A new quantitative framework for accessing drought and dust storms in the Northern Great Plains will be established through analysis of state meteorological records from the 1930s, coupled with geospatial analysis of the aerial photographic record. The 1930s will be compared to the modern-day agricultural landscape by geospatial analysis and soil properties.

This database, which leverages dust fluxes measured by a portable wind erosion device (PI-SWERL), will identify critical dust source areas, dust emission processes, and yield the key information needed for dust emissivity estimates from potential drought-stricken areas. Coupled atmosphere-land dust emissivity modeling using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model will provide insights on dust storm formation, trajectory, duration, and the regional and global fate of dust loading events.

This framework will also be able to account for the extreme drought variability observed across the Great Plains. These results will provide needed insights on how extreme climate variability projected for the 21st century will impact atmosphere-land interactions for drought prone areas in the agriculturally important Great Plains.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.