:O*
Saharan dust might bring haze
It might be a bit hazy on Friday thanks to a Saharan dust outbreak.
Essentially, that is a cloud of sand picked up by the hot winds over the Sahara Desert in North Africa and delivered to this region on the back of a tropical wave.
The outbreaks aren’t that unusual, said hurricane specialist Jack Beven of the National Hurricane Center in Miami-Dade County.
“They happen at least a couple times each summer,” he said. “This one doesn’t look like anything out of the ordinary.”
On the other hand, it looked pretty impressive to Joseph M. Prospero, a professor of marine and atmospheric chemistry at the University of Miami. He was in Barbados over the weekend.
“It was very dense and hazy during our stay there,” he said. He added that he saw thick haze across much of the Caribbean when he flew back to Florida on Sunday.
Just the same, the National Weather Service in Miami expects the dust to disperse for the most part before it reaches our neck of the woods.
“The greatest concentration of dust will stay down in the Caribbean and not come over Florida,” meteorologist Robert Molleda said.
Saharan dust, by the way, can hamper tropical waves from developing into tropical storms; an unusually high number of outbreaks last year helped make the 2006 hurricane season relatively calm.
otra explicacion para la relativa calma en el caribe :O*