Dust the key to which years will be busier hurricane seasons

The UWM scientists' findings add another piece to the puzzle. They pored over 25 years of satellite data from 1981 to 2006 and noticed a correlation between periods of intense hurricane activity and scarce amounts of dust in the atmosphere. In years when stronger dust storms rose up, on the other hand, fewer hurricanes swept through the Atlantic. - sciencedaily.com

NVDL: I would have thought the opposite is true. More dust implies drier conditions in Africa, which implies greater heating/warming. The caveat may be that more dust in Africa means that heating is more localised there (for that year) than say, a few thousand miles to the west. I'd be inclinedto say that local ocean temperatures are the main test for a Hurricane season. The higher the temperature of Gulf waters between June and November, the better your likelihood of a stronger storm season. Probably it;s more complicated than that.

clipped from www.sciencedaily.com "Really we are just in this, almost this era of just more hurricanes occurring," said Amato Evan, satellite meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "Consistently, years where there was a lot of dust, there were less hurricanes or vice versa. Years where there wasn't very much dust, there were more hurricanes," Evan said. Wind over Africa blows west -- towards the United States -- carrying massive amounts of dust from sandstorms in the Sahara desert. As the dust passes over the Atlantic, it blocks out the sunlight cooling ocean temperatures below the ideal temperature to form hurricanes. "One dust storm at the right place at the right time might really help to interrupt the intensification, or even the genesis, of a potential hurricane," Evan said.