Chinese desert dust reaches California skies

People up in the Eastern Sierra noticed recently that the sky was kind of hazy, and the usual culprit — dust from the Owens Lake bed that the Los Angeles DWP dried up years ago — could not be blamed. Turns out the haze was caused by suspended particles from "a massive dust event last week in the Gobi Desert" that rode the jet stream across the Pacific. Hat tip to the Air Blog of the Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District. Photo of the dust over China on March 14 from NASA's Earth Observatory.