If you live in El Paso, Las Cruces, or Ciudad Juárez and feel like you’ve been inhaling the Chihuahuan Desert lately, you’re not imagining things. The Borderplex region is experiencing its dustiest season since the Dust Bowl, the period of devastating dust storms that hit North America a century ago.
NASA’s Aqua satellite captured an image of the airborne dust from low-Earth orbit on April 27. The swaths of airborne particles are part of an ongoing set of storms pummeling the Borderplex, the transnational area that includes southern New Mexico, West Texas, and the Mexican state of Chihuahua. The imaged storm is just the latest in a string that is yeeting dried-up lake beds and parched soil into the southern skies.
This year’s drought-exacerbated dusty season is “truly exceptional—one for the record books,” said Thomas Gill, an environmental scientist at the University of Texas at El Paso, in a NASA Earth Observatory release. Gill has tracked dust activity across the planet (and the Borderplex specifically) for decades.
The event imaged above is the tenth “full-fledged” storm of the year—a full-fledged event being a storm that reduces visibility to less than half a mile, Gill said. That’s more than five times the average of 1.8 storms per year—and makes 2025 the worst dust season since 1936, when the Dust Bowl swept America, laying into El Paso with 11 storms.
Why are there so many storms this year? You can blame it on a climatic cocktail of drought and record-breaking wind. March was the windiest month the region has seen in over 50 years, Gill said, and the area is in “the worst drought we’ve seen in at least a decade.” My allergy clogged sinus is thanking its lucky stars it isn’t in the Southwest right now.
But dust storms aren’t just an eyesore. The events contribute to traffic accidents and raise the risk of cardiorespiratory problems, and may worsen the spread of Valley Fever, a fungal infection. Gill and his colleagues estimated that dust storms rack up over $150 billion in damage nationally each year, hitting farmers, the energy and healthcare industries, and households especially hard.
NASA’s satellites and modeling tools are helping scientists monitor and better understand how dust travels—and way up in the atmosphere, the particles can traverse significant distances. One March storm sent particles all the way to Greenland, according to Santiago Gasso, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Maryland who is based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, in the same release.
So far in 2025, the Borderplex has accrued 28 dusty days—already exceeding the annual average of 22 over the last quarter-century—and more dust is in the forecast for the region this weekend. If you don’t have to, you may want to hold off on cleaning your windows.
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