Authors
Daniel Tong, Irene Feng, Thomas E Gill, Kerstin Schepanski, Julian Wang
Publication date
2023/3/10
Journal
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society
Volume
104
Issue
5
Pages
E1067 - E1084
Publisher
American Meteorological Society
Description
Windblown dust events, including dust storms and smaller blowing dust events, pose severe risks to public health and transportation safety. In the United States, the statistics of fatalities caused by dust events remains elusive. We developed a new dataset by merging dust fatality data from NOAA Storm Events Database and the Department of Transportation Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS). There was a total of 232 deaths from windblown dust events from 2007 to 2017. This number is much larger than that reported by the NOAA Natural Hazard Statistics, which assigns some dust fatalities to high winds and thunderstorms (∼45%) and does not include many events in FARS. Dust fatalities are most frequent over the Southwest, consistent with the spatial distribution of dust storm occurrences. Other high-risk regions include the Colorado Plateau, Columbia Plateau in Washington and Oregon, the High …
Total citations
2023202443
Scholar articles
D Tong, I Feng, TE Gill, K Schepanski, J Wang - Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 2023