We’re officially less than a month away from the summer season! However, that hasn’t stopped Central Florida from turning up the heat as much as we have over the last few weeks. With that, our sea breeze thunderstorms are in full effect. Day-to-day showers and storms are likely to become a bit more repetitive if we can keep some moisture in the air.

There’s also something else we’re tracking that could likely end up in our air. If you’ve been around for a summer or two, and especially a hurricane season here in Central Florida, you know all about the Saharan dust that can sneak in over time.

If you aren’t quite familiar just yet, let’s get you up to speed!

The Saharan Air Layer (SAL), as it’s coined in the meteorological realm, technically occurs nearly year-round. But its presence is only widely known into the summer because of the movement and positioning of the forces driving it.

The number one factor influencing where the dusty air goes is our Bermuda-Azores high. This is a CLASSIC feature you’ll hear or see referred to a lot when tracking all things tropics during the hurricane season. Winds around our high pressure get stronger and flow in a clockwise fashion when the center itself is a bit stronger. Higher pressure naturally results in higher wind speeds around where it’s located.

That same high pressure is responsible for generating the “easterly” winds that flow across the equatorial regions of the northern hemisphere. They get a little speed boost when our Bermuda-Azores high is in a bit more excited state.

Getting into the northern hemispheric summer, we also have something called the West African Monsoon (or if you want to call it the WAM, that’s even cooler). As showers and storms get to rocking over northern Africa, just like we see in Central Florida, they produce bands of high surface winds called “outflows”.

Strong gusty winds blowing around a desert is naturally going to kick up tons of dust and sand. Trust me, having been stationed in the desert and deployed to the Middle East on occasion, I’m very familiar with dust and sandstorm conditions.

Finally, a mechanism just like the jet stream we track across the United States that drives cold fronts, warming trends, and big-time weather for our area occurs over North Africa. This is called the African Easterly Jet (AEJ).

You combine each of these three pieces, easterly winds, active monsoon, and the jet stream kicking stuff into the Atlantic basin, and that’s the equation for your Saharan dust plumes that can work their way as far west as us in Florida.

What does that mean for us??? If you’ve been battling allergies, I hate to say it, but they won’t quite be going away just yet.

In bad dust outbreaks, folks who battle asthma or COPD may find it far more difficult to function throughout the day, especially if they work outdoors. So be careful and stick with your weather team here at News 6 so you can identify when impacts could be more fierce than on other days.

Also, if you just recently had a car wash or plan on getting one here in the near distant future, you may want to double down on your efforts to keep the car clean. Your outdoor furniture will also need a couple of additional cleanings as we go over the next few months.

Saharan dust tends to hover several thousand feet in the air, the mid to upper levels of our atmosphere, well above where we are at ground level. So while it doesn’t come down on us like a traditional sandstorm, you can quite literally see it in the sky. You’ll notice mornings and evenings taking on a much more vibrant orange or yellow glow.

So your photos will definitely be a lot more flashy.

However, when it rains, the dust also gets encapsulated in the droplets that make it down to us on ground level. This will coat any surface with a brown sheath of dust. Think of it like freezing rain; when it hits the ground, it freezes. In this case, when the droplets hit, all that dust is released and immediately sticks to any surface.

On a side note, Saharan dust also promotes sinking across the tropical Atlantic. Last year was a proven case, dry dusty air tends to smother anything tropical from spinning up. We’ll see how that plays a role in the season ahead, especially since we’re only days away from the commencement of the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season.