“Winds pick up an estimated 100 million tons of dust from the Sahara Desert each year, and a sizable portion of it blows out over the North Atlantic Ocean. A fresh supply of dust was airlifted from the Sahara in early June 2022, and some of it appeared to be headed for the Americas.

The Sahara Desert is by far Earth’s largest source of airborne dust, and the storms can arise at any time of year. In winter and spring storms, Saharan dust often ends up fertilizing the nutrient-poor soils of the Amazon rainforest. Dust storms in the summer tend to loft material higher into the atmosphere, allowing plumes to travel thousands of kilometers on high-level winds. Those summer seasonal wind patterns can carry the dust from Africa to the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. Plumes of dust recently reached Florida, Texas, and other southern U.S. states in mid-May 2022.”

                                                                    NASA
                                    Earth Observatory, 2022