Daniel Tong, Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Aerosols in the J. Shukla Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Earth Sciences department in George Mason’s College of Science, and Siqi Ma, Research Scientist in the same department and at the university’s Center for Satellite and Earth Science Research, have received funding for a study titled Characterization of international and domestic sources of windblown dust and contribution to fine and coarse particulate matter in Texas. The project is supported by a $160,470 award from the University of Texas at Austin, with funding that began in May 2026 and runs through late August 2027. Over that period, the team will pursue a set of interlocking objectives designed to transform how dust pollution in Texas is understood, modeled, and ultimately managed.

The scale of the problem is considerable. Particulate matter is conventionally divided into two regulated size classes: PM2.5, particles with diameters of 2.5 micrometers or smaller, and PM10, particles up to 10 micrometers across. Fine particles are small enough to slip past the body’s natural defenses and lodge deep in the lungs, and they have been linked in a vast body of epidemiological literature to cardiovascular and respiratory disease. Coarse dust particles, while generally less able to reach the deepest reaches of the respiratory system, can still trigger asthma attacks, aggravate chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and reduce visibility. Dust contributes to both categories, but its relative share of each has been notoriously difficult to pin down, because dust storms are episodic, spatially patchy, and highly sensitive to weather and land conditions.

Texas offers an ideal natural laboratory for studying these dynamics. The state sits downwind of major arid and semi-arid dust source regions in the American Southwest and the Chihuahuan Desert of northern Mexico, and it experiences frequent dust events driven by strong frontal passages and dry conditions. At the same time, much of Texas itself contains erodible soils, agricultural lands, and drought-prone regions that can generate dust locally. This dual character, in which the state is both a recipient and a producer of windblown dust, is precisely what makes the source-attribution question so challenging and so consequential. Air quality regulators need to know whether the dust measured at a monitoring station in El Paso, Lubbock, or Dallas was born in the neighboring desert or in a plowed field just up the road, because the answer determines which policies, and which jurisdictions, bear responsibility for reducing it.

The George Mason team has structured its investigation around four specific objectives. First, the researchers will investigate long-term trends in windblown dust activity in Texas and in three upwind states: New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Colorado. Establishing whether dust activity is increasing, decreasing, or shifting in timing and location is a prerequisite for everything that follows. Long-term trend analysis in dust science is notoriously tricky, because dust emissions respond nonlinearly to wind speed, soil moisture, vegetation cover, and land disturbance, and because observational records are uneven across space and time. By focusing on a multi-state region rather than Texas alone, the study acknowledges a fundamental truth of atmospheric transport: dust does not respect political boundaries, and the air arriving in Texas today may have been lifted from the ground in New Mexico or Oklahoma days earlier.

Second, the project will analyze the environmental drivers behind those dust trends. Dust emission is the end product of a chain of conditions: loose, dry, fine-grained soil; winds strong enough to lift particles; and insufficient vegetation or surface crust to hold the ground in place. Changes in drought frequency, land management practices, agricultural expansion and abandonment, and even groundwater depletion can all alter how much dust a landscape emits. By diagnosing which drivers are responsible for observed trends, the researchers aim to distinguish between dust activity that reflects natural climate variability and dust activity tied to changes that human decisions could influence. That distinction matters enormously for forecasting and for any future mitigation effort.

The third objective is methodological and potentially the most technically significant: improving the dust emission model itself by integrating satellite-detected dust sources and updating other model inputs. Dust emission schemes in air quality models have long struggled with a basic problem, namely that they must estimate emissions from land surfaces using proxies such as soil texture, vegetation index, and wind fields, while the actual dust plumes are visible from space. Satellites observe dust after it has been lofted, which means the plumes encode information about where and when emission actually occurred. By feeding satellite-detected dust source locations back into the emission model and refreshing other inputs, the team hopes to reduce one of the largest sources of uncertainty in dust modeling. Better emission estimates cascade through the entire modeling chain, improving not only source attribution but also forecasts of dust storms and assessments of how dust contributes to violations of air quality standards.

Fourth, and tying the whole project together, the researchers will quantify the contributions from in-state and out-of-state dust sources to PM2.5 and PM10 concentrations in Texas. This is the source-apportionment step that regulators and policymakers ultimately care about. Under the federal Clean Air Act, states must develop plans to address particulate pollution, and dust events can complicate those plans considerably. If a monitoring site records high PM10 during a dust storm, the question of whether that dust was generated within Texas or transported from New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, or even Mexico affects how the exceedance is interpreted and addressed. A rigorous, model-based quantification of domestic versus imported dust gives air quality managers a defensible scientific foundation for those determinations.

The project also reflects a broader shift in atmospheric science toward treating dust as a first-order environmental concern rather than a regional curiosity. Dust storms affect visibility on highways, contribute to the transport of soil-bound contaminants and pathogens, alter the radiation balance of the atmosphere by scattering and absorbing sunlight, and deposit nutrients and pollutants on ecosystems far from their origin. In the American Southwest and Southern Plains, dust has been implicated in hazards ranging from fatal multi-vehicle pileups on Interstate 10 to the degradation of snowpack in distant mountain ranges. As climate change alters precipitation patterns and land use pressures intensify, understanding the trajectory of dust activity becomes a matter of infrastructure planning and public safety, not merely academic interest.

For Tong and Ma, the 15-month timeline is ambitious but focused. The funding structure, with support flowing from the University of Texas at Austin, suggests a collaborative arrangement in which the Texas-based partner has a direct stake in the results, likely tied to the state’s air quality planning needs. The deliverables, a characterization of dust trends across four states, an analysis of their environmental drivers, an upgraded emission model incorporating satellite observations, and a quantitative split of fine and coarse particulate matter contributions by source region, are designed to be directly usable by the agencies and researchers who manage Texas air quality. If the project succeeds, it will offer something the dust research community has long needed: a clear, observationally constrained answer to the deceptively simple question of where the dust in the air actually comes from, and a template for answering the same question in other dust-affected regions of the country and the world.

Subject of Research: Sources and transport of windblown dust contributing to PM2.5 and PM10 particulate matter in Texas

Article Title: Tong and Ma studying international and domestic sources of windblown dust

Article References: Tong and Ma studying international and domestic sources of windblown dust. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: windblown dust, particulate matter, PM2.5, PM10, air quality, Texas, dust emission modeling, satellite remote sensing, source apportionment, atmospheric science, drought, George Mason University