Many Imperial Valley residents have grown weary of repeated public health studies around the Salton Sea. One group of scientists is trying to focus on solutions instead.
Amato Evan was in the desert when the dust storm arrived.
Evan was near Ocotillo Wells, in the western foothills of the Imperial Valley. The winds approached from the West as the sun was setting, stirring up the powdery soil. Suddenly, the dust was all around them. Evan tried to keep an eye on the ground, but he could barely see where he was going. His heart raced.
Evan had prepared for this moment. As a professor of atmospheric sciences at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, he researches the physics of dust storms for a living. He’d traveled to the Imperial Valley in mid-May to study the storm’s activity. Even still, he was nervous.
“The visibility was so bad,” Evan recalled in an interview with KPBS later that week. “I’m like, 'Oh man … I might just have to stop and wait a couple hours.'”
At least eight major dust storms have erupted in the Imperial Valley and the neighboring Coachella Valley since the turn of the century, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Half of those storms have taken place in just the last five years.
The events, also known as haboobs, can make travel hazardous and cause accidents or leave people stranded in remote areas. They can also carry harmful particles that burrow deep into the lungs.
For more than a decade, scientists like Evan have been trying to better understand the health impacts of these storms. Researchers have examined the density of particles in the air, asthma rates in nearby towns and increased strain on the region’s fragile health care system.
But many Imperial Valley residents have grown weary of studies that all seem to reach basically the same conclusion — that the impacts of dust storms are bad and getting worse. Instead, some advocates have urged researchers to look beyond merely diagnosing problems and develop projects that could make a material difference on what it means to live and work in the Valley.
“We’re a petri dish for studies,” said Luis Olmedo, the executive director of the environmental justice group Comite Civico del Valle, in a recent interview. “But how much of that has gone to solve our problems?”
Evan hopes to answer that call. He leads a statewide team of scientists across the University of California system focused on creating a new tool: an early warning system that could alert people before dust storms happen.
“The ideal scenario is that people that live in these areas can wake up in the morning and look on their phone and find out, ‘Is there going to be a dust storm today?’” Evan said. “That would be my vision for what I think would be something useful.”
A billowing challenge in the West
Once considered a relic of the 1930s Great Depression era, dust storms are once again a growing challenge across the western United States.
That’s because human-caused climate change is driving more frequent and more severe storms around the world, according to researchers. Just last month, heavy monsoon storms surged across southeastern California and parts of Arizona, sending a wall of dust rolling across Phoenix.
One contributor to these dust events is the slow-motion drying of the massive inland lakes across the western U.S. caused mainly by climate change and intensive water use. Among them is Imperial Valley’s Salton Sea, the largest inland lake in California.
Under pressure from intense water use and climate change-fueled drought, the vast lake is steadily receding. As the lake dries, it leaves the surrounding playa more vulnerable to high winds, which can pluck the exposed soils from the ground and hurl them into the air.
Some dust particles, also known as particulate matter, are harmful simply because of how tiny they are. But the Salton Sea is also laced with decades of agricultural chemicals, pesticides and the remnants of military bomb testing — which researchers have warned may be making it into the air as well.
Those converging factors, among others, have led to an intense scientific focus on the region around the Salton Sea.
But for many residents, it’s not clear what difference those research efforts have made for the tens of thousands of people who live and work in the Valley.
Olmedo, the environmental justice advocate, has led Comite Civico since the early 2000s. To him, well-intentioned researchers have often failed to center the expertise and needs of people who experience the region’s environmental disasters firsthand.
“We, as a community, are experts in everything when it comes to dealing with health issues,” Olmedo said. “Any project that should be done should begin here.”
Local environmental justice groups have developed some ways to monitor the regional air quality themselves.
In 2007, Comite Civico began developing a network of dozens of sensors in partnership with public health researchers with the University of Washington. The sensors capture live readings of particulate matter in the air using light-based scanners. Comite Civico has installed them at schools and other landmarks across the valley.
That system became increasingly important during the pandemic, Olmedo said.
“It was the eyes and ears for (state environmental officials),” he said. “Even though they couldn't travel, they were able to see what was happening in the community.”
County officials have also set up some ways to monitor dust. The Imperial County Air Pollution Control District has eight cameras set up to capture photographs every 30 seconds, providing a live view of the horizon from stations across the valley.
But although the Imperial Valley’s air monitoring systems have improved, they are still limited to capturing air quality in real-time. They still have no way of warning people before dust storms happen.
‘What we need are solutions’
It was through a conversation between Olmedo and Evan, the Scripps professor, that the idea for an early warning system emerged.
“‘We don't need any more studies,’” Evan recalled Olmedo saying in November 2023. “‘What we need are solutions.’”
Olmedo remembered their conversation the same way. “I don’t mince words,” he told KPBS. “I say it directly.”
Olmedo’s words sent Evan deep into thought. He began to consider what solutions he could come up with and how his work could make a positive impact. The answer he came up with was a dust forecast.
“(It's) the really simplest way that we can help people reduce their exposure to dust,” Evan said. “And that is trying to tell them when a dust storm is going to occur.”
The way it could work could be as simple as the built-in weather app on a smartphone, Evan said. The system he envisions would be able to forecast dust storms days ahead of time and would also be able to alert people in the hours or minutes before a storm actually arrives.
To Evan, the benefits are clear: a reliable dust forecast would give people time to take steps to protect themselves. If you work outside, a forecast could remind you to pack an N95 mask or ask your employer to provide one. If you’re coaching a soccer team, a forecast could be a sign to cancel practice earlier to give everyone a chance to get home safely.
And crucially, he said, a forecast is within reach with the technology we have today. Dust forecasting systems already operate in places like Arizona, where transportation officials have deployed a warning system along some of the state’s most storm-prone highways.
“It takes a little bit of investment, because it's not an easy thing to do — but it's something that's very possible,” Evan said.
The long-term goal: A dust forecasting system
The challenge Evan faces now is a lack of funding.
To forecast something as complex as a dust storm, you need to understand the specific geography and weather patterns of that region. Evan’s team needs specialized instruments and field researchers to measure wind speed and erosion, along with advanced computers to run the models that would predict how dust might move.
Last year, Evan went to the California legislature. He spoke with State Senator Steve Padilla, D-San Diego, who introduced a bill that would have set aside $3 million in state funding for a trial version of the dust forecast.
The bill failed to pass. In a statement, Padilla’s office declined to say whether he would try to seek funding again.
Evan and his colleagues haven’t given up. They are currently pushing ahead with a different strategy: attempting to build the system piece-by-piece, cobbling together different projects that all have elements useful for a dust forecasting system.
The first of those pieces, is a new project Evan is working on with funding from state air quality regulators.
In some ways, the project is unsurprising. Its primary goal is to determine whether there are toxic materials in the soil around the Salton Sea and where they might be traveling.
But that study, Evan said, will also allow his team to start developing computer models for the flow of dust around the valley. Evan is working on at least four other research projects around the Salton Sea, each of which he said will help build other foundations for the forecasting system.
“If we can put all of those different pieces together, we might start to build that pie,” he said.
Evan acknowledges that the forecast system will be expensive to develop. But he points out that even $3 million is a tiny amount compared to the hundreds of millions that state and federal authorities plan to pour into restoration projects around the Salton Sea in just the next few years.
In 2023, the Biden administration committed $250 million toward Salton Sea restoration. In November, California voters passed a new climate bond dedicating an additional $170 million.
“To me, it's just always a little bit hard to understand why we wouldn't put a tiny fraction of that money into something that can help people now,” Evan said.
‘These are life-saving tools’
For some residents who live around the Salton Sea, the idea of a forecasting system has been exciting.
Nellie Perez, a resident of the northern Imperial County town of Niland, said she was a little skeptical of the scientists when she helped them organize a community meeting in town last month. The stream of studies around the Salton Sea, Perez said, have made her “a little jaded.”
But she said the long-term goal of a dust forecast felt like a different story.
“We could take precautions,” Perez said. “No, we can't have an event outdoors, you know. Let's bring our shades down — let’s not plan a trip on that day.”
Candace Youngberg, a resident of the shoreline town of Bombay Beach and secretary for the local community services district, said she’s had good experiences with Evan’s colleagues in the past.
Youngberg said their town had worked with UC Riverside professor William Porter, who is part of the UC Dust collaboration, to develop and test homemade air filter systems several years ago.
“They were very communicative,” Youngberg said.
Olmedo, the environmental justice advocate, still has lingering concerns.
In particular, Olmedo worries about whether an early warning system will be sustainable in the long-term — and whether the technology will remain the intellectual property of a university and eventually be placed behind a paywall.
“These are life-saving tools that can come out of this,” Olmedo said. “You want to make sure that they are open source, they are available to the public and that they are owned by the public.”
(According to Evan, his research group will make all of their data freely available online. He said UC Dust has a policy of always publishing all of their findings publicly.)
Still, Olmedo is glad that researchers like Evan are thinking more actively about the impact of their work and how it could make a material difference on peoples’ lives.
“I think this is a good opportunity to sort of reset,” he said. “We embrace and we welcome researchers, but please understand how we've been promised and how we've been neglected.”
