Black Sunday refers to a severe dust storm that occurred on April 14, 1935, as a part of the Dust Bowl, which was a series of dust storms that had been occurring all through America during 1930s. It was one of the worst dust storms in American History, it had caused massive economic and agricultural damage. It had been estimated that 300 million tons of top soil had been moved from prairie areas in US. The black blizzard started in the Eastern state in 1930, affecting agriculture from Maine to Arkansas. Then by 1934 they had reached the Great Plains, stretching from North Dakota to Texas.
That afternoon of April 14th, residents of the Plains States had been forced to take cover as the dust storm or black blizzard, blew through the region. Oklahoma Panhandle and Northwest Oklahoma were the first to be hit, and then moved south for the remaining days. 4:00p.m it hit Beaver, Boise City around 5:15p.m, finally Amarillo and Texas at 7:20p.m. The storm was more severe due to the high winds that hit the area that day also the combination of drought, erosion, bare soil, and winds caused the dust to fly freely and at high speeds.
The causes that made the blizzard so sever was due to the cattle farming and sheep ranching which had left the West devoid of any nature, that would have anchored the soil, and due to that lack of allowing nature to replenish itself the soil was left dehydrated and lacking organic matter.
The effects caused by the dust storm, and especially by the storm on Sunday, caused hundreds of thousands of people to be homeless and needing somewhere to stay, due to this they had flooded California, overtaking the state’s health and employment infrastructure. In 1935, after the massive damage caused by these storms, congress passed the soil conservation act, which established the soil conservation service. The Soil conservation Service was created to provide guidance for land owners and users to reduce soil erosion and improve forest and field conservation.
After the government doesn’t want another dust bowel to happen, research has been able t provide environmental evidence to what produced the storm and what could, prevent massive destruction or at least prevent any death, because man cannot control the weather. So scientist today have found that ships have recorded sea surface temperatures for more than 150 years. Even before they had begun any studies, other research had notice that drought tended to be accompanied by unusual sea surface temperature in other parts of the world. The scientists used a model to run a simulation of the 20th century’s climate patterns. The model was able to reconstruct the dust bowel drought quite closely, providing strong evidence that the sea surface temperature may have had an impact on causing the drought.
The model had data on the sea surface temperatures most tightly linked to the drought were in the tropical Atlantic, where the waters were slightly warmer than usual, and in the tropical Pacific, where they were slightly cooler. The actual temperature difference were small, just be a tenth of a degree Celsius. The change in the tropical Atlantic probably contributed to the drought by disrupting a band of low-lying air that blows moisture over the Great Plains from the Gulf of Mexico. The role of temperatures in the tropical Pacific is still not well-understood, but it appears to involve the generation of large-scale circulation patterns that suppress rising motion over the Great Plains. Interactions between the Great Plains land surface and the atmosphere also played a great role in the drought. The severe event seem to have occurred once or twice before over the last 400 years. Some evidence suggests droughts lasting more than a decade during the last 13th and 16th centuries that were much much more severe than those of the 20th century, according to Siegfried Schubert a colleagues at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre. “Certainly history suggests that we can expect much worse than what happened in 1930, but the warning seems to be unique in last fewer decades, it’s difficult to say what impact of that will be,” Siegfried Schubert said. In the future Schubert predicted, improved climate models and global satellite observations should lead to useful predictions of the chances of long-term drought.
But what if scientist in 1930 had this technology, what would have happened? Well man can’t stop a natural disaster from happening, but they can prevent agricultural and economic damage to a minimum. With the technology and research that has been found, it could have lead to an evacuation of people and preparedness for cattle and other farming industries, allowing them to bunker down or move to safer areas. If the research on the temperature of the sea could help in predicting a dust blizzard and having satellite imaging to also predict the movement and areas going to be affected, this would prevent or decrease a death toll in animals and people, also having agricultural lands well manage reducing the amount of top soil being moved.