Tremendous Dust Storm Across the Northern Plains
On the afternoon of 14 May 2026, a strong midlatitude cyclone centered over the prairie provinces of Canada forced very strong winds in the Northern Great Plains of the continental United States. This in turn lofted an extreme amount of dust into the lower atmosphere, lowering visibilities to less than a mile and creating hazardous conditions across parts of the Dakotas. KELO-TV in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, has images and video of this event. Satellites, of course, are an excellent tool to diagnose the origin and extent of this kind of event.
But first, let’s start with the surface chart. The following image shows the 1200 UTC surface analysis on 14 May 2026 from NOAA’s Weather Prediction Center Surface Map Archive. It depicts a strong cyclone centered over western Saskatchewan with a central pressure of 985 hPa and a modestly high isobar gradient. An occluded font extends to the Saskatchewan/Manitoba/North Dakota triple point, with a cold front stretching southward and a warm front extending to the southeast.
The satellite view of this same time, as captured by the GOES-19 (East) Band 13 (10.3 micron) channel, clearly shows the presence of a mature cyclone. Since this is 1200 UTC, the sun hasn’t quite risen yet over western Canada and Montana, so the infrared band remains the go-to tool for a couple of hours yet. We can see some deeper cloud development ahead of the occluded front and along the cold front as well.
As the day progressed, this cyclone intensified. The central pressure dropped and the pressure gradient tightened. This resulted in a substantial increase in wind speeds across the region. This next loop depicts the GOES-19 True Color view of the cyclone throughout the daytime hours of the 14th on a 30 min time scale. Watch as the dust originates over regions ob both north-central and western Montana and then is advected eastward.
There are going to be two significant ingredients for a dust storm: strong winds, and bare soil. We’ll start with the first and look at the winds at the time. Here’s a look at the winds from across the northern tier of the continental United States as captured by the NOAA Weather Prediction Center. This is from 1800 UTC, so at the time the dust was really starting to pick up according to our satellite loop. Note the presence of 30 and 40 kt winds across much of the region. A 40 kt wind is 46 mph, and it’s important to remember that these are sustained winds, so gusts are even higher.
The other important ingredient, of course, is having bare soil. Strong winds can blow across vegetated regions and not contribute to significant dust lofting as the vegetation anchors the soil and prevents it from being blown around. However, if there are bare fields then winds can easily pick up the dirt and carry it. We can use satellites to assess how much vegetation is present. First, let’s start with the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) from the JPSS Direct Broadcast. Remember, plants absorb visible light to make food via photosynthesis, so their visible reflectance is quite low. But vegetation reflects a lot of shortwave infrared light. If we compare those two channels, we can identify what parts of the land is vegetated versus bare, snow, or water as they all have different spectral signatures. Here’s a plot of NDVI from 12 May as captured by VIIRS from NOAA-21 and processed by SSEC’s own Community Satellite Processing Package (CSPP). This plot is shaded with greener regions corresponding to higher NDVIs and browner representing lower ones. While there was some cloud cover in western North Dakota obscuring the signal somewhat, we can see that the regions where the dust originated in Montana correspond to low NDVI values.
We can even track NDVI values over time. Here is a plot from the European Union’s Sentinel 2 satellite, as recorded in the Copernicus Browser. A region of eastern Montana was selected, and the mean NDVI for that region for every satellite overpass over the course of a year was calculated. The rightmost part of this time series represents the most recent observation. Note that the NDVI is higher now than it was in the dead of winter when the region was covered in snow, but it is still much less than it is in the summer peak when crops (mostly wheat and sunflowers) are at their maximum greenness before being harvested. This is a good indicator that there’s a substantial amount of bare ground in this region.
But we can even look at the spectral signature of this area. Sentinel 2 observes at several different channels in the visible and near infrared, and we can plot up the reflectance as a function of wavelength for all of those channels. The most recent spectral signal for western Montana is plotted below in light green. The typical spectral reflectance for grass (dark green) and soil (brown) is also shown. Note how closely the observed region matches the soil plot while having very little in common with the grass plot. Clearly, this is a region that is dominated by bare soil.
So, we clearly have our two main ingredients of strong winds and bare soil. When we put them together, we definitely get an intense dust storm. That was born out by the surface observations at Minot, in western North Dakota. Here’s a meteogram from Minot in western North Dakota courtesy of the Plymouth State Weather Archive. The “vis” line is the visibility in statute miles, and the wgst line shows the wind gusts in knots. Note how the gusts at 2000 UTC are at 54 kts (62 mph)! No wonder the visibility dropped to just a mile. Conditions were even more extreme further west in Williston, ND, where gusts as high as 67 mph were recorded.
One of the most useful tools for identifying and tracking dust storms is the Dust RGB product. Here’s an animation of the Dust RGB from GOES-19 throughout the daytime hours on the 14th. The magenta regions denote high dust concentrations and easily identify where the dust originated and clearly show it being drawn northward into the center of rotation of the low pressure system. The recipe for the Dust RGB only relies on longwave bands, so while we’re only showing the daytime hours in this loop, it’s available and useful at all hours of the day.
The dust also clearly affected the optical depth of the atmosphere. Here is the aerosol optical depth (AOD) as recorded by the polar orbiting NOAA-21 and retrieved by CSPP as it passed overhead at 2010 UTC. Note the intense band of high AODs stretching from north-central Montana to central North Dakota.
Dust storms aren’t uncommon in the central United States this time of year. The Blog covered a less intense event in eastern North Dakota and Minnesota a few days earlier while it was almost exactly one year to the day since a major dust storm impacted Chicago, an event we also covered. Here in the early part of the growing season, when fields are being tilled for planting, the time is ripe for these kinds of events to take place.