"Dirty Rain" In Midwest, East Blamed On Texas Duststorm

A car in Truxton, Missouri this weekend after light rain
showers mixed with dust from Texas hoisted aloft by
strong winds caused mud showers across large
areas of the Midwest and East the past few days. 

When my late father was a teenager in the 1930s, he woke up one March morning at his home in West Rutland, Vermont to find it had snowed overnight. 

Hardly an unusual occurrence in the Green Mountain State this time of year. 

But the snow wasn't white. It was brown. 

Those were the Dust Bowl days, when an unprecedented drought and poor farming practices joined forces to create immense dust storms in the Great Plains. 

These dust storms were so big that the dust carried high aloft, merged with storms further east. Those storms deposited rain and snow, mixed with the dirt in the sky carried from places like Kansas and Nebraska.

I thought of dad's story this week when I saw news reports of "dirty rain" falling this past week in places like St. Louis, Cincinnati, Charleston, West Virginia, Columbus, Ohio, Raleigh, North Carolina  and numerous other cities in the Midwest and East.

Turned out it was a similar situation to the Dust Bowl era.

The huge windbag of a storm that struck the middle of the nation last week swept New Mexico and Texas with winds gusting to more than 60 mph. Parts of western Texas and New Mexico are in extreme drought, so things out there are even dustier than usual. 

Those winds stirred up huge clouds of dust that darkened the skies and cut visibility to a mile or two in cities like El Paso, Austin, San Antonio and Dallas.  

False color satellite photo from last Friday morning. A 
powerful storm had sent clouds of dust from New Mexico
and Texas aloft. Here, the dust was concentrated high
over Oklahoma. Winds moved that dust 
eastward into areas of showers in the Midwest and
East, where it mixed with raindrops to create 
weird mud showers 

The winds were so powerful the dust was carried aloft - much like in the 1930s. That dust blew through the air over Illinois, Missouri and other states. That grime ran into lingering rain showers over the Midwest and East.  

The result was light showers of mud. 

These mudowers, I'd guess you'd call this dirty rain showers, had people wondering what the heck was going on. Residents of central Virginia, awakening Saturday morning to find their cars speckled in dirt, wondered if some nefarious agent was spraying some dangerous substance. 

Residents of Raleigh, North Carolina also found cars speckled in dirt after overnight showers. 

St. Louis, Missouri had their mud showers Friday, leaving cars and windows covered in dirt. The storm was probably a huge bonus to window washing businesses and car washes. 

There was some snow up here in Vermont during this episode. But the dust aloft did not make it this far to the north and east.  The dust aloft moved eastward through the Ohio Valley and eventually off the Mid-Atlantic coast. So the snow that fell Friday and Saturday here in Vermont was your traditional white, not brown. 

Some more snow is likely in Vermont today and tonight, but since the air flow is from frozen southern Canada,  not dusty west Texas, the snow should stay white, unless something completely  unexpected happens. 

These dirty rain storms parts of the nation have seen in recent days might not be over. Another powerful storm - perhaps even stronger than last week's is forecast to develop in the Great Plains toward next weekend. 

That storm could pull more dust from the drought zones of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas and drop more mud showers, who knows?