In the southwestern United States, a looming wall of dust can bear down frightfully fast on communities, ruining visibility for drivers and becoming a breathing hazard that can have long-lasting health effects. The National Weather Service uses satellite data to forecast these dust storms, and now four Maryland high-school students designed an app called DustWatch, that will allow people to have faster access to dust storm information.

"The project got started in middle school when we were watching a documentary about dust storms in class, and we really saw how devastating dust storms could be," said Bill Tong, a rising senior at Atholton High School in Clarksville, Maryland.

Bill's father, Daniel Tong, supported his interest in the project. He's a dust researcher at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, who works with NASA's Health and Air Quality Applied Sciences Team (HAQAST). HAQAST researchers are partnering with dust forecasters at the National Weather Service to improve these critical forecasts for the U.S. Southwest and across the country.

Dust storms, also called haboobs, form from winds generated during thunderstorms that kick up a wall of dust several miles long that can rise hundreds to thousands of feet into the air. They can occur anywhere in the United States but are most common in the Southwest, where dry dusty conditions are prevalent. Propelled by strong winds, dust storms can travel for hundreds of miles. Their biggest hazard is to road conditions where visibility can suddenly become almost non-existent, causing accidents. Breathing the fine particulate dust and the micro-organisms that come along can also cause long-term health problems, including Valley Fever.

"It turns out there was no readily available way to warn the public about dust storms. You had to jump through a lot of hoops to find the data and you might not get the data pertaining to you. It's really complicated. So we decided to build a solution for it," Tong said.

The DustWatch app is now available on the Apple App Store. From a user's phone, the app pulls in location-specific data every hour of dust concentrations and wind and visibility conditions from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Weather Service, which uses NASA and NOAA satellite data to analyze dust in the atmosphere and project where it will go. Users also receive push notifications to their phone from 48-hour dust forecasts to get early warning of impending dust storms.

When they first started out, Tong, his brother Jeffrey, and two friends, Kevin Liu and Alex Xie, didn't know anything about coding an app. But at his local Patuxent Toastmasters meeting in Columbia, Maryland, Tong met Edgar Nzokwe, an engineer at Booz Allen Hamilton, who had a background in software development. With their app idea in mind, Tong asked Nzokwe to mentor them in learning to program. Nzokwe agreed and trained the students on Swift, a programming language used for developing iOS apps.

After a few months of learning and planning, the students began working on DustWatch in earnest during the summer of 2018. They would meet for two to three hours a week at each other's houses, working around busy schedules once the school year began. As they delved deeper into development, a second advisor joined their team, Dexin Zhang, a scientist at the National Weather Service who is also Liu's neighbor. Zhang helped the students understand the data sets they needed.

Once they had a functional app, they began asking friends and parents to test it and give them feedback, said Jeffrey Tong, a rising sophomore at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Feedback also came from a broader audience. In December, the students gave a talk about DustWatch at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in Washington, and in January 2019, they presented at the HAQAST semi-annual meeting in Phoenix, Arizona. At each meeting they talked with dust researchers and air quality scientists, some of whom live in Arizona and New Mexico, who offered insights on living with dust storms and how to improve DustWatch's features.

"This experience definitely gave our team a boost of confidence and helped validate our idea," said Kevin Liu, a rising sophomore at River Hill High School in Clarksville, Maryland. "The feedback they offered helped us better understand issues with our app and provided direction on how to improve it."

The students said they were drawn to the problem-solving aspects of taking a big problem and breaking it down into a series of smaller problems that they could actually solve. What ultimately kept them going, however, was knowing that their app could help people forecast the unexpected and unpredictable dust storms.

"In middle school I gave a lot of thought to what I want to be when I grew up, and I thought like a pilot or something, because that's cool, flying airplanes," said Alex Xie, a rising sophomore at Gilman Upper School in Baltimore, Maryland. "But I realized that I wanted to do something that positively impacted the world. That's why I wanted to build this app."

With DustWatch now available on iOS, the students' next project is to make an Android version. After that, they have a list of new features they want to add, including customized dust warnings for driving routes and the ability for users to enter data on dust observations and dust-related damage or illnesses that will flow back to scientists who are improving the dust forecasts and studying their impacts on communities.

Related Links
DustWatch
Weather News at TerraDaily.com

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