DustWatch: A Highway Safety Project by Youth Citizen Scientists to Mitigate the Damages of Dust Storms

Dust storms are capable of reducing visibility to zero within areas hundreds of miles wide for several hours, hampering travel by road and by air. Additionally, particles lifted by storms can cause respiratory difficulties, diseases, fungal infections, and crop abrasion. In the Southwestern United States, dust storms are among the deadliest extreme weather events along major highways, in particular Interstate Highway I-10. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has reported that the frequency of dust storms in the region has more than doubled between the 1990s and 2000s. Climate models predict that the number of dust-induced highway accidents will continue to rise in the coming decades, causing billions of dollars in damage annually. Such issues compromise the integrity of public safety and infrastructure, in addition to reducing agricultural and economic production significantly. The growing amount of losses inflicted by dust storms without proper safety strategies concerned us as youth. However, modernization of technology and industries has allowed scientists to predict weather incidents with much higher reliability at lower costs by creating and distributing applications on mobile devices to the general public. Thus, we addressed the issue by developing DustWatch, a free application that will provide users with safety information for storms and forecast times, locations, and severities of dust storms through reliable data presented in a user-friendly interface. The application will thus adequately predict the majority of dust storms in an accessible manner. We present here our recent efforts to build such a communication system to minimize the number of deaths and costs to infrastructure, public safety, and commerce caused by dust storms. Through this project, we demonstrate how youth citizen scientists can contribute to improving resilience to extreme weather events for surface transportation safety using modern technology.