Sustainability

As the Saharan Air Layer (SAL) carries its dusty load from Africa to the Americas, the grains of dust reflect some of the sun’s heat, keeping the sea surface under the clouds cooler than it would otherwise have been. This cooling effect can block or slow the development of hurricanes, which need the updraft from warm water to gain strength. However, there is more to the relationship between dust clouds and tropical storms than just sea surface cooling.

The Sahara Dust season in the tropical Atlantic generally starts and finishes about a month ahead of the hurricane season. It produces spells of strange weather – there’s a thin haze that isn’t fog, sunrise and sunset produce big stretches of brilliant colour, and a thin film of dirt seems to be getting into everything.

Sunday, June 18, will be Father’s Day in many parts of the world. It’s a day to show some respect to all the fathers who support and care for their families – not as big a deal as Mother’s Day, perhaps, but a special occasion all the same.

The hurricane forecasting season reached its peak a couple of weeks ago, just as the storm season was about to get under way. NOAA delivered its 2017 outlook at the end of a week of public education, much of which was spent showing off a battery of new tools for observation and data processing. The agency gives a 70% probability to a season with 11–17 named storms of which 5–9 become hurricanes, with 2-4 major hurricanes.

This weekend, the Marine Park Trust will be celebrating the 25th anniversary of its establishment. In fact, the history of the Marine Park and the Trust began in the 1970s. It took nearly 20 years of tireless work – endless plans and proposals, meetings and presentations, hours of careful diplomacy and occasional acts of outright war – to get formal legal protection and management for what is now the Marine Park.

The nation’s environmental managers are between a rock and a hard place. A clean healthy environment isn’t a luxury. It may be a matter of life and death. But it has no place in Government’s funding lineup, and Government has no money anyway. So we’re on our own and it’s time to stop complaining and go to work. Labour Day is a good time to start