A vast plume of dust from the Sahara Desert swept across much of the Caribbean on Monday, marking the largest such event of the year and triggering health warnings as it moves toward the southeastern United States.

The dust cloud spanned more than 2,000 miles from Barbados to Jamaica and stretched roughly 750 miles from the Turks and Caicos Islands down to Trinidad and Tobago. The phenomenon, known as the Saharan Air Layer, is a dry, dusty mass of air that forms over the Sahara Desert and moves westward across the Atlantic from spring through fall.

“It’s very impressive,” said Alex DaSilva, lead hurricane expert at AccuWeather. “This is the strongest plume we’ve seen so far in 2025.”

In affected Caribbean nations, hazy skies obscured the sun and worsened air quality.

Forecasters across the region warned residents especially those with respiratory conditions such as asthma or allergies to stay indoors or wear protective masks when outside.

According to Yidiana Zayas of the US National Weather Service in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the current dust concentration measured 0.55 on the aerosol optical depth scale, the highest recorded this year. That metric gauges the amount of sunlight blocked by airborne particles.

The thick plume is expected to travel northwest, reaching parts of the US Gulf Coast including Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi by late this week and into the weekend. While the dust tends to disperse as it moves beyond the eastern Caribbean, forecasters say the size and density of this particular plume could still impact air quality in the southern US.

“These plumes often thin out over distance, but this one has a notably high concentration, particularly in the eastern Caribbean where it can even dim the sun,” said DaSilva.

Saharan dust plumes typically occur between April and October and are known to suppress tropical storm activity by drying out the atmosphere. Their presence is most common and intense in June and July just as the Atlantic hurricane season begins to ramp up.

In June 2020, a record-breaking cloud of Sahara dust-smothered the Caribbean. The size and concentration of the plume hadn’t been seen in half a century, prompting forecasters to nickname it the “Godzilla dust cloud.”

Erizia Rubyjeana

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