Severe Drought Brings Wildfires and Dust Storms
This dust storm in Queensland, Australia, in 2005, marks one of its hottest and driest years on record. Australia wasn’t alone. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), drier than average conditions contributed to an active wildfire season in the United States that burned more than 8.5 million acres in 2005. This exceeds the old record, set in 2000, for acreage burned in a wildfire season for the U.S. as a whole. At the end of November 2005, 18 percent of the contiguous U.S. was in moderate to extreme drought , in contrast to 6 percent at the end of November 2004. Worldwide, severe drought took to parts of Southern Africa, the Greater Horn of Africa and large parts of Western Europe, and the Amazon River basin saw its worst drought in decades.