Latest / Closing Market Report / CMR | What Causes a Dust Storm in Illinois
Transcript
- cmr260602 A blowing dust warning was issued Monday afternoon in rural Champaign County. Strong southerly winds combined with weakening storms kicked up thick plumes of blowing dust from the fields across central Illinois. The national weather service reported that there was near zero visibility reported on at least three interstate highways in Illinois. Although dust storms are common in Illinois, they can often be dangerous. Last year, Illinois experienced a dust storm early in the growing season. A blowing dust advisory was issued for parts of the Chicago area with wind gusts as high as 35 miles per hour. Three years ago a dust storm caused a 84-vehicle pileup along I-55 south of Springfield. Eight people died and dozens more were injured. Doctoral student in Physics at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, Maddie Stover and Illinois State Climatologist with the Prairie Research Institute, Trent Ford taking a closer look into this week's dust storms that swept across central Illinois. Funding for Weather Realness is partially provided by the Backlund Charitable Trust. If you have a question for a local scientist on this program, please leave a voicemail at 217.333.2141 or email weatherrealness@illinois.edu - Maddie Stover, host and doctoral student - University of Illinois - Trent Ford, Illinois State Climatologist - ISWS PRI --- Weather Realness Podcast with Maddie Stover and Trent Ford Todd Gleason: I'm University of Illinois Extension's Todd Gleason, the host of the Closing Market Report. I'm away from the office today, so we will not have an update of the commodity markets. However, we will explore dust storms through the latest edition of the Weather Realness Podcast that's produced by Illinois Public Media. In it, host Maddie Stover and the Illinois State Climatologist, Trent Ford, explore the reasons behind the recent dust storms—or just dust storms in general. You may recall that a blowing dust storm warning was issued for Champaign County on Monday, May 4, as strong southerly winds combined about a month ago with some weakening storms to kick up thick plumes of blowing dust from the fields. The National Weather Service reported near-zero visibility at the time on at least three interstates. Weather Realness Podcast full Dust Storm Episode URL: https://will.illinois.edu/weatherrealness/episode/how-a-dust-storm-swept-across-central-illinois-earlier-this-week Todd Gleason: What's next is the conversation University of Illinois doctoral student and host of the Weather Realness Podcast, Maddie Stover, had with Illinois State Climatologist Trent Ford in that same week. Here's Maddie. The Monday May 4, 2026 Dust Storm in Illinois Maddie Stover: So, can you walk us through the conditions that led to—well, kind of just remind us in general what a dust storm is, and then what conditions set up this blowing dust advisory that was in effect Monday, May 4? Trent Ford: Yeah. So, a dust storm is an area of really intense blowing dust that usually covers a large area—tens of miles, in some cases hundreds of miles—moving fairly quickly. The main impacts and the problems that it causes are really dangerous, hazardous driving or transportation conditions, and air quality problems. Those are the two big ones, other than just looking apocalyptic and Mad Max-y. What we need to set up a dust storm, before the wind even comes, is a period of dryness so that the soil can get dry enough that it becomes loose. Now, in the desert Southwest, they have it all the time. No problem. All they need is wind. Here, we have a little bit siltier, in some cases clay soils, that are a little bit finer-grained. So, we're not going to have as much loose-textured soil, which means we have to dry it down. The other way that we can get that soil to become more airborne is by working it. So, tilling practices—those sorts of things that loosen that soil, make it easier to drill in the crop at the beginning of the spring—also make that soil more prone to becoming airborne and wind erosion. So, we need that kind of setup. It helps to also have low humidity and very little rainfall during the actual condition. And then we need the wind. So, we need pretty strong winds. April and May are the windiest time of the year in Illinois; that's always been the case. So, we always have plentiful winds. It's really a matter of just getting that soil workable or dried enough that it becomes airborne. And that's exactly what we saw earlier this week. We had not necessarily super dry soils, but soils that were dry enough and had recently been worked—either planted or tilled ahead of planting—that made them really erodible. Then, very strong straight-line winds, as well as outflows ahead of thunderstorms, picked up the dust and created a larger dust storm problem. Maddie Stover: So, even though we'd had all that rain the past couple of weeks, the tilling made it loose enough that it could be picked up by these winds? Trent Ford: That's right. It's exactly right. This is very different than what we saw in 2023 with that deadly dust storm in Illinois, where we were very dry. We were dry down to maybe an 8- or 10-inch depth in the soil. This is not the case. Our 4-inch soil moisture—I just checked it here in Champaign this morning, and in Springfield—is above average for this time of the year. So, it's not that we had dry soils necessarily; it's that the soils were recently worked and made much more easy to become airborne and have that wind erosion. Maddie Stover: So, are these dust storms for this time of year unusual in Illinois? Trent Ford: Okay, so it is very common this time of the year, but not necessarily common in Illinois. That's a weird way to put it. So, basically, dust storms are not necessarily a common occurrence in Illinois. We've gone through these periods of time—in the '30s, the '50s, parts of the '80s, and then really the last three or four years—where they have been relatively frequent in Illinois, where we've gotten a couple of noteworthy dust storms each year. However, over that anthology of dust storms in Illinois, virtually all of them occur in either April or May. So, if we're going to have a dust storm problem, it's going to be now, right at the tail end of April, the beginning of May. The question may come up as to why. Well, we have the right conditions. We have the wind; it's very windy this time of the year. We can get enough dryness, and we also have worked soils. Now, when we talk about wildfires, it was the dryness, the vegetation—dead vegetation, that sort of thing—that can make for that spark of wildfires. However, the reason we don't have very many dust storms in the fall is because we have crops in the field still that are—even when they're dead, and even when they're picked—if that corn stover (the very little part of the corn that remains standing) or the soybean stubble is still in the field, it often times will provide enough cover to significantly reduce the risk of windborne erosion. So, even just a little bit of vegetation cover, even if the vegetation is dead, can be a buffer against dust storms, which is why almost all the dust storms we see is when we have bare soils and those strong winds, which is April and May. Maddie Stover: So, Trent, you mentioned that one of the most hazardous parts of these dust storms is zero visibility while driving. If you're on the highway and you get that urgent warning on your phone from the National Weather Service that there's a dust storm coming, what should you do? Trent Ford: Well, just being aware of your situation. So, if you get the warning that there's a dust storm warning and you are on a main thoroughfare like an interstate, it's best to try to get to an exit as safely and quickly as possible. So, if you're not seeing immediate near-zero visibility, but there is a dust storm warning in your area that is covering your area, try to get to the nearest exit and pull off to a gas station, any kind of parking lot—anywhere where you can stay stationary and safe until the dust storm passes or the warning passes. If you are caught in the area of near-zero visibility, what you should do is as quickly but safely as possible get to the side of the road, turn your lights off, and remain there until the zero visibility passes. Now, this is something that's very different in a situation of like heavy rain or other kinds of things where people put on their four-ways. What we saw in 2023 and other notable dust storms was that when people put on their four-way lights or were on their brakes, because visibility is near zero, folks would look for those tail lights as a means of saying, "Okay, the traffic is still moving," and then, in reality, the traffic was stationary and people would come up too quickly and we'd have accidents. What people should not do: just keep going. Right? That's not an answer. Slam on their brakes and stop in the middle of the road—that's asking for trouble. That's what I call the Texas solution, because what Texans will do—and I have many personal accounts with this—what Texans will do is come up to an icy bridge during the winter at 80 or 90 miles an hour, hit the ice, and then slam on their brakes. I use any opportunity to take a jab at Texans. But anyway, don't slam on your brakes in the middle of the road. That's asking for trouble. But quickly but safely get to the side of the road, turn those lights off, and then remain there. That's what's really important. Do not get out of your car. Don't get out of your car; that's a very, very bad idea. Maddie Stover: And about how long—so say Central Illinois sometime this spring—how long would you need to wait that out? Is that like a 10- or 15-minute type of thing, or would you be there for a while? Trent Ford: Usually 10 to 15 minutes before the near visibility will stop. Depending on how bad the traffic backup is, it may take an hour or so to get out of there, but often times these dust storms are not super long-lived experiences. Now, again, the 2023 dust storm was very different. It was not really caused by the outflow boundary of a thunderstorm, which is pretty narrow, relatively narrow. It was just more this area of very strong sustained winds, so it lasted for hours. But that was an extreme situation. In most cases, like earlier this week, it was a pretty narrow band of dust and it passed in a matter of minutes. Todd Gleason: That's Trent Ford, Illinois State Climatologist with the Prairie Research Institute, the Illinois State Water Survey. He was recorded the week of Monday, May 4, which is the week when dust storms took place right here in Central Illinois. Maddie Stover is the host. The Weather Realness Podcast can be heard on WILL AM 580, by the way, at 11:00 AM Saturday mornings and 8:00 PM Sunday nights, or you can simply search out the podcast. There are many episodes, and they're continuing online. Look for Weather Realness and Illinois Public Media. Now, let's continue on with the dust storm conversation. Here's host Maddie Stover. Maddie Stover: You also mentioned some of these upper respiratory impacts. What are good precautions for people who might be at higher risk to take during that time of a dust storm? Trent Ford: Yeah, just the same thing when we talk about air quality with wildfires and air quality in general. The dust that's in the air is particulate matter; it's solids that come off of the topsoil. Here in Central Illinois, that topsoil can contain other types of chemicals or heavy metals that can be problematic. So, what you're going to want to do is stay inside when we have that risk of blowing dust or a dust storm warning. If you have any indoor air filtration or air quality things, just turn those on. If you're outside or you have to be outside, think about wearing an N95 mask—those kind of things that we're all very used to these times of the year. So, just understanding that dust is an air quality problem, the same way that if you were to get a warning about particulate matter or nitrogen dioxide or anything else, ozone in the atmosphere, that can be problematic. And so, just taking those precautions is really important. Maddie Stover: And so, these dust storms, do they have any impacts on like agriculture or waterways? So, like, is losing this topsoil an issue for farmers? Trent Ford: It is. It's sort of—so first of all, whenever I see the dust, I think to myself, "Well, there goes somebody's topsoil." The glaciers, glaciation brought us this wonderful organic material and deep layers of black soil that is really the lifeblood of Illinois agriculture. And we don't have another glaciation; another glaciation is many, many, many years away. So, we've got to rely on what we got. And when we lose that through water or windborne erosion, it takes a toll. The issue really is that—well, I should back up—it takes a toll on agricultural profitability, on yields, on infiltration rates, which means that it's harder to deal with water extremes when we don't have that nice topsoil. The issue really is, though, that it's harder to quantify the agricultural loss from a farm due to windborne or waterborne soil erosion than it is when we take a direct hit on, let's say, crop yields. Now, if you have a really bad year from a crop yield, most of it may be due to a drought or heatwave or flooding or something that happened that was more of a kind of a contained event. But likely, with these kind of erosion events, there is a small part every single year kind of taken off the top. Sort of like when we get the evaporation off of a nice barrel of bourbon, right? You lose a little bit of bourbon every single time—it's the angel's share. We're losing a little bit of profitability from our farms because of this wind and waterborne erosion. So, there is a need to reduce windborne erosion of soil and our topsoil in Illinois from a safety standpoint, but also from an agronomic standpoint. Maddie Stover: You talked about the need for some solutions to this water and wind topsoil erosion. What are some effective large-scale solutions for farmers to help reduce this type of erosion? Trent Ford: Yeah, for windborne erosions and the kind of situations that bring on dust storms, it's really field cover. That can be cover crops; that's fine. Even terminated cover crops—so the cover crops that are killed this time of the year to make way for the cash crop—is providing enough cover. I mentioned that leaving corn stover in the field or soybean stubble in the field is oftentimes sufficient to reduce windborne erosion. So, things like no-till practices. And there's a big difference between no-till and cover crops. Cover crops, you have to add something. Right? You have to pay for the seed, you have to pay for the termination, you have to manage it and make sure that the biomass doesn't get out of control. There's a lot of decisions in place. No-till is the absence of something, so it's a little bit easier of an uptake for farmers who are a little bit concerned about changing those management practices. That being said, it's really the field cover that matters the most. We can instill things like windbreaks, hedgerows, tree breaks—those things have benefits for reducing strong wind damage on crops during the growing season, as well as reducing windborne erosion. But in the absence of those kinds of edge-of-field practices, it's really in-field cover that matters the most. Maddie Stover: If you're just tuning in, you're listening to Weather Realness, the weekly podcast about weather and climate. Today, we are talking about dust storms with Trent Ford, Illinois State Climatologist with the Prairie Research Institute. So, you talked about no-till. Does no-till also—is that also used for carbon sequestration? Trent Ford: It can be. So, no-till practices—so the idea that carbon can be sequestered, carbon dioxide can be sequestered in the soil is something that has been proven. However, the effectiveness of no-till practices for carbon sequestration is quite variable. So, that is something that is not as easily said, "Okay, yes, absolutely, we're storing a ton of carbon in there." And what we see a lot of times is this issue of we go for 10, 12 years of no-till practices, and then land management changes—regimes or ownership or leasor or whatever—and we go back to a more traditional type of tillage practice. It's a question of how much of those legacy storage of carbon is actually lost from just one tillage. So, that's a lot more uncertain. What we do know, and what we've seen time and time again with study after study, is that these no-till practices and maintaining that field cover does significantly reduce windborne erosion. Maddie Stover: So, kind of looking to the future under climate change, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information, dust storms have become increasingly common in the US. What is causing dust storms to develop more frequently? Trent Ford: I'm going to try to decide how much to get on my soapbox here. I'm going to try not to do so much. I know, I know, I know. I gotta send you out with a bang here. Okay, so climate change is really complicated. Most of the problems with climate change happen locally. But a lot of the work that's done on climate change has a larger scope than that—national scale, international scale. What this can lead to is an application of a large narrative, like a national-scale narrative, into a specific location. In this case, the fact that dust storms are increasing nationally applied to Illinois. It's true that when we aggregate across the entire United States, dust storms are happening more frequently in recent years, and that may be attributable to climate change. However, the vast majority of that increasing trend is out West, where we're seeing the aridity, where we're seeing increased temperatures and decreased rainfall. We are not seeing the same kind of trends here in Illinois. The fact that we've had an uptick in dust storm activity over the last few years is not evidence of some kind of climate change trend. We know that climate change works in these long terms, so what we'd have to see is many years of year-after-year changes in dust storms. And then, even if we see that, we have to have enough evidence to attribute that to a change in climate and not sort of land management practices. So, for example, if we break this down into its different components, what are the things that make for dust storms? It's strong winds, and it's dry soils. That's the climate forcing. Are we getting windier in Illinois? Well, everybody and their dog thinks that, myself included, but none of the data supports that. Study after study shows inconclusive results; we haven't changed our wind speeds much. So, we're not getting windier. It's still windy—it's still windy every April and May—but we're not getting windier. Is our soil getting dryer? Not from tilling, not from land management, but from the climate—is our soil getting dryer in April and May? Absolutely not. April and May, we're seeing increased precipitation. Everybody and their dog puts in tiles in their fields now because of increased precipitation and soil inundation in April and May. It's a counter against increased moisture in the soil. So, it's not a climate-driven signal here that we're seeing. We can't even say if this last few years of dust storm activity is part of a long-term trend in Illinois versus a short-term aberration. Now, I'm not trying to downplay the problem of dust storms in Illinois, because we saw eight people die just three years ago, right? There was a report of a school bus driver just earlier this week who had to literally wipe off the dust off the front of the windshield of the bus. Announce: I've driven through blizzards and tornadoes and, you name it, I've never seen anything like it. Announce: Jennifer Garrett says she was in Farmer City when it began to look cloudy. Then, she stopped by the village of Mansfield and headed toward Illinois Route 136. Announce: We got about halfway down it, and you couldn't see anything. Announce: The dust storm began to cover every part of the bus, inside and out. Announce: I had a full bus. Dirt was coming in all the windows, it was in my eyeballs. It was everywhere. Announce: She says she turned on the flashing lights and took her foot off the gas, letting the bus idle on the road. Announce: You couldn't see somebody in front of you if they were stopped, which was why I just idled, because there's nowhere to pull over, and you can't just stop in the road with 70 kids on a bus. Trent Ford: That's dangerous. We're playing with fire here. So, we do need to understand what is causing dust storms in Illinois, and if we do see an uptick. But so far, there is little to no evidence that this national idea of dust storms becoming more frequent is actually happening in Illinois. Maddie Stover: Yeah, there's a couple of good points that you talked about there. Like, a national overall statistical trend doesn't necessarily mean that something's changing here locally. And these climate systems are very hard to disentangle from human systems. Trent Ford: Yeah. Maddie Stover: Yeah. So, just if you see, you know, a local uptick in the next couple of years, doesn't mean that everything is going to dust with climate change. Trent Ford: Right. And it actually would be really counterintuitive to—we don't want to be climate denialists, that's for sure. But we also, if we attribute everything to climate change, we could and we will likely miss important factors that may be the actually primary cause of a trend. So, by saying this is the climate, we're really disregarding the demonstrated, evidence-based role of land management practices. Maddie Stover: Yeah, and we talked about this with wildfires as well. Like, yes, aridity in the West is increasing wildfire in the West, but also this demographic change of people moving closer and closer to that wildfire interface, and there are sparks and kind of their interactions. So, it's really like the human and the climate factors coming together. Trent Ford: Exactly. Yep. Maddie Stover: All right, that's all we've got time for today. Thank you so much for joining us, Trent. Trent Ford: Yeah, thank you, Maddie. Maddie Stover: This has been this week's Weather Realness. If you have a weather or climate question you want us to tackle, leave us a voicemail at 217-333-2141 or email weatherrealness@illinois.edu. Weather Realness is produced by Jeff Frame, Trent Ford, Steve Nesbitt, Reginald Hardwick, Stephanie Oriana, and myself, Maddie Stover. Funding for this podcast is partially provided by the Backlund Charitable Trust. Weather Realness is produced by the Department of Climate, Meteorology, and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Illinois Public Media. We'll talk with you again next week. Todd Gleason: You've been listening to the Weather Realness Podcast on this Tuesday afternoon. I'm University of Illinois Extension's Todd Gleason. Thank you for being along with us today on the Closing Market Report. Of course, I'm out of the office for the afternoon. You can always visit our website at willag.org—w-i-l-l-a-g.o-r-g—to find the latest from the agricultural markets each and every business day of the year. And if you're interested in the Weather Realness Podcast, you may search it out online and find it on the WILL website as well. Look for Weather Realness and Illinois Public Media in your favorite search engine, or you can just tune it in at 11:00 AM on WILL AM 580 Saturday morning and 8:00 PM on Sunday evenings. The Closing Market Report is a production of Illinois Public Media. It is public radio for the farming world. When you visit our website, you'll also find information from the FarmDoc team with the agricultural economists here on the University of Illinois campus, along with the animal scientist and the crop scientist. Have a very good and a very, very safe afternoon. I'm your UI Extension's Todd Gleason.