Implications of an Asian dust storm on the Gulf of Alaska

A large dust storm occurred in the Gobi and Takla Makan deserts in April 2001, which resulted in dust cloud which traveled east over the Pacific Ocean, extending from the Hawaiian Islands to the Bering Sea. This dust cloud was tracked using the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) total ozone mapping spectrometer onboard the Earth Probe satellite. The dust traversed most of the North Pacific in six days before a majority of it was deposited off the coast of British Columbia, Canada. During the storm, dust was deposited into a high-nitrate, low-chlorophyll region of the North Pacific Ocean, where two mesoscale eddies were located. Cloud cover precluded satellite detection of potential phytoplankton growth, as chlorophyll 'a' from moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer or sea-viewing wide field-of-view sensor satellites, from the dust deposition. The deposited dust was enriched in iron relative to zinc, but in terms of diatom requirements, the dust was enriched in zinc.