What effect did the Dust Bowl have on the temperature spike in the 1930's?

[NickB79]

I have long felt that one of the main factors of the temperature spike that was seen in the US in the 1930's was the conversion of green prairie, pasture and cropland to dark, denuded soil which then proceeded to turn the central Plains into one giant heat sink.

What I'm wondering is if there has ever been any research, published papers, or computer modeling that tried to calculate how much of an effect millions of acres of dark brown soil would have on the temperature of the continent as a whole, which would either confirm or invalidate my hypothesis?

[XemaSab]

1. The blowing dust would have cooled the area somewhat though.

:shrug:

[The Croquist]

3. Maybe but...

How often and how much of the sun was blocked by the dust? Maybe 5% (I'm winging it). Also is the dust reflecting the energy into space or absorbing it so that when it lands it still has it with it?

On the other hand...

Plants absorb energy rather then reflect it back. That energy is used to grow so it is not immediately put into the atmosphere but it will eventually get there. Now the rotting vegetation from the year before may have actually released less energy back because, with the drought, less of it would decay.

Something that I do know...

When we have a thunder storm in Georgia the temperature drops as cold water from way up high hits the ground and me.

A conclusion I'm not qualified to make (like that ever stopped me before!)
No rain will tend to warm things up.

It would be an interesting and a complex model that would need to be tested in the next great dust-bowl to be proven. Hopefully I won't see it or if I do I'll be 156 at the time. That's my plan and I'm sticking to it.

[ezgoingrl]

2. Well, here's what I know.

It was really, really hot and it stayed that way for a long time. There was no rain and when the wind started there were no windbreaks to stop it, so the dust was horrible. The bugs, rats and mice were horrible in people's houses because there were no crops for them to eat outside. The bugs would even get underneath the wallpaper in people's houses to get at the paste. In fact, women would take their irons and run it over the wallpaper to kill the bugs!

I've lived in the area(Oklahoma) my entire life and we still get dust storms from time to time. Thank goodness they only last a few hours and not days at a time. Here's an interesting article I found:

http://www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe30s/life_02.html

[phantom power]

4. Loss of vegetation usually increases albedo.

Dry dusty terrain is lighter than darker vegetation. All other things begin equal, that has a cooling effect. On the other hand, vegetation has a cooling effect via transpiration. Essentially, a natural swamp-cooler.

In reality these things play off each other. If a drought lasts long enough, the vegetation dies, and then you lose the cooling effect, and water evaporates from the topsoil even faster, and you start losing topsoil due to wind erosion (dust storms), which causes further vegetation loss. See China.

[The Croquist]

5. One thing I think we can all agree on

is that it's not a good idea to mess with nature without knowing what you're doing...

I've got some neighbors from Oklahoma. They're just 50 but they heard the stories while they were growing up. Both sets of parents ended up in the military. It was probably the best way out.

I wonder how long it took to recover from. Not just economically but population, quality of life social structure and mental health. I could see "grandma" looking west watching for dust storms every day for the rest of her life. Some of the grand kids probably thought she was just a crazy old lady.

Maybe I'll watch "The Grapes of Wrath" tonight.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032551/

[phantom power]

6. Far as I can tell, the Great Depression changed the survivors forever.

My grandmother on my mother's side was a food-hoarder til the day she died. It took my parents days to clean out her food storage room. On my dad's side, they were (by today's standards) misers. They let their basement wall cave in, rather than pay for the electricity to run a dehumidifier. My wife has some similar stories about her grandparents.

I think about them a lot these days, because I've been wondering how what's coming might affect me, and if maybe my grandchildren will tell stories like that about me someday.

Good times!

[pscot]

7. Tim Egan wrote a book about the dust bowl

The Worst Hard Time. I don't think it answers the question in the OP, but it describes the farming practices that led up to the disaster and gives a terrific account of what it was like. It's a good read, and somewhat shorter than the 300 page epics that seem customary today.

[Iterate]

8. It's a bit more complex and nonlinear than that

NOAA and NASA modeling with historical data shows that a La Niña weakened the low level jet stream, initiating the drought, and that anomalies in three tropical basins made it uniquely worse. The dust was kicked up mainly in the spring and fall when the strongest cold fronts moved through. The summer temperature spikes were due to the lack of soil and vegetative moisture -think Phoenix.

More recent modeling suggests that the drought was pushed farther north than it might have otherwise when a Pacific pressure ridge set up a flow of hot winds into the upper Midwest, and interestingly, the dust caused local cooling, resulting in less evaporation and rainfall.

Geophysical Research Letters, http://www.agu.org/
Exceptional atmospheric circulation during the “Dust Bowl”
Abstract:The three‐dimensional, regional and large‐scale atmospheric circulation during the “Dust Bowl” is analyzed based on newly available historical upper‐air data and reconstructed upper‐level fields. The Great Plains Low Level Jet, transporting moisture into the region, was weakened on its eastern side, shallower, and penetrated less far north than during wet years. Nocturnal convection was likely suppressed by increased stability. Strong mid‐tropospheric ridging was found over the Great Plains, and upper‐tropospheric flow anomalies extended from the North Pacific across North America to the Atlantic. These findings provide a dynamical view of the “Dust Bowl” droughts, some aspects of which are distinct from other droughts. It is demonstrated that this is important for assessing predictive capabilities of current modeling systems.
Citation: Brönnimann, S., A. Stickler, T. Griesser, T. Ewen, A. N. Grant, A. M. Fischer, M. Schraner, T. Peter, E. Rozanov, and T. Ross (2009), Exceptional atmospheric circulation during the “Dust Bowl”, Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L08802, doi:10.1029/2009GL037612.

In 1936 I think it was, my grandparents planted corn on May 1st and it was all gone by June 1st. They burned corn cobs the next winter to stay warm.

[happyslug]

9. The Jet stream moved south, providing no moisture to the area...

The assumption today is that the Jet Stream dipped south into Northern Mexico from the Gulf of Mexico, instead of flowing North into the Great Plains and taking the water from the Gulf up with it. I use the term "Assumption" for the US did NOT yet know of the Jet Stream (Through the Japanese did, which is why the Japanese plan to use Balloons to ignite the Forests of the American West during WWII would have been extremely effective, if the Japanese had NOT built into their Balloons a defect that caused most of them to sink into the Pacific while before the Balloons would have reached the US Forests).

Anyway, the Jet Stream moved South and with it most of the Water from Rain Water the Plains received over the previous several years. No Cloud Cover and no water to cool it down, the sun just baked the Soil. This slowly dried out what was left of the Water in the Soil and the Dust Bowl was born.

More on the Dust Bowl and the Jet Stream:
http://www.innovations-report.de/html/berichte/geowissenschaften/bericht-27161.html
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=forces-behind-devastating

The Japanese Balloon attacks of WWII (Which Continues the story that the Balloons were ineffective, but the US response was immense, kept the only Black Paratrooper regiment in the States to fight any potential fires, kept the US Air Force busy trying to shoot them down (They did get 20 of the 300 that are believed to have reached the US), force the US to find out the Hydrogen factories foe the Hydrogen used in the Balloons, destroying two out of the three plants capable of making Hydrogen in Japan (Which forced the Japanese to curtail the program in Spring 1945). The Article is great, point out the Japanese only expected 10% of the 9000 Balloons launched to hit the US, the US acknowledged 300 hit the US, but given the vastness of the Western Forests it is believed (and stated in the Article) that over 1000 hit the US (i.e EXCEEDING the 10% estimate of the Japanese, something the Article never says). Japan still lost the war, but it is believed to be the start of US Air Force research into high Attitude balloons that expanded greatly in the late 1940s and 1950s (The "UFO Incident" at Roswell, is believed by many to have been an US Air Force Spy Balloon that was designed to go over the Soviet Union, at a time the US did NOT have any aircraft capable of doing so. The "Aliens" are believed, in this theory, to be either dwarfs or midgets, whose small size permitted the container that held the spy camera to be made as small and light as possible for the trip. The "strange Alphabet" reported was Cyrillic Alphabet to confuse the Russians if one of the Containers even landed in the Soviet Union. The "Special material" reported were custom made early versions of advance plastics that the people had never seem before and thus tried to see it in terms of what they knew, which was primary metal. Al this ended when the U-2 became operational, The U2 was believed to fly so high it could NOT be shot down. The earlier program regarding Spy Balloons was canceled and all records destroyed, for it was an Air Force Project and it had clearly shown that Fighters could NOT intercept such Balloons, To defend against such balloons you needed heavy cannon or anti-aircraft Rocket, both left in the hands of the Army when the Air Force became an independent service in 1947.

I am getting off the subject, but it is always funny to see inner-service rivalry in action (And I suspect it was an important part of the Roswell Incident). I remember reading "Operation Blue Book" and the author clearly stated his superiors were more afraid that the UFOs, being reported in the 1950s, was a Navy Project that the Air Force did NOT know then if the UFOs were a Soviet project the Air Force did not know about.

Back to the Jet Stream, the cause for the move is now believed to be a lowering of the Temperature of the Pacific as the Temperature of the Atlantic went up. Winds, including the Jet Stream, are products of such displacements of temperatures. With the Jet Stream over Mexico and dumping most of its water into the Pacific, the Great Plains were left waterless AND exposed to more Sun. The more Sun something is exposed to the greater it heats, which produces winds which drove the Dust Bowls. When the temperature of the Atlantic and Pacific returned to a more normal level the Jet Steam returned North and with it brought water and cloud cover that reduces the espoused of the land to the Sun (Thus temperatures went down after the Dust Bowl era ended).

I should point out that the efforts of the Federal Government to end the Dust Bowl, while ineffective at the time, reduced the area subject to such a switch in the Jet Stream by the time a similar situation developed again. Another lesson in the unpleasant fact that to prevent a disaster you must plan for the disaster during good times, even if that means reducing what is produced during the good times. What was needed in the 1930s was that in the 1910s and 1920s water conservation rules for the area being enforced AND huge tracts of marginal farm land being kept OUT of production. By the 1930s those actions were to late for the 1930a but as implemented in the 1930s and afterward has helped prevent another dust bowl from developing.