>>174600, >>174601, >>174602, >>174603
Chris Martz @ChrisMartzWX - Fun fact: You’re wrong.
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The man-made “Dust Bowl” was mainly confined to a relatively small area in northern Texas, the Oklahoma Panhandle and western Kansas.
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The 1930s decade-long drought covered the entire Heartland. The extreme heat during the spring and summers of July-August 1930, June 1933, May-August 1934, June-August 1936, and September 1939 covered much of the Lower 48 and Canada.
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Farmers’ plowing deep-rooted perennial prairie grasses and replacing them with shallow-rooted annual crops outside of Liberal, Kansas or Boise City, Oklahoma were not responsible for all of that. Sure, it amplified the drought and heat locally, and it caused the dust storms that swept through the Plains, but it didn’t cause the continental scale drought or heat.
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The drought itself was naturally forced by persistent La Niña conditions in the equatorial Pacific and an unusually warm subtropical North Atlantic (e.g., Schubert et al., 2004; Seager et al., 2008).
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1095048
open-access: https://www7.nau.edu/mpcer/direnet/publications/publications_s/files/Schubert_et_al_2004.pdf
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/clim/21/13/2007jcli2134.1.xml
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Below average sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies in the tropical Pacific induced negative 500 hPa height anomalies over the tropics, and positive anomalies over the mid-latitudes. This resulted in large-scale subsidence over the Plains, which suppressed rainfall.
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Concurrently, a warm Atlantic generated an anticyclonic circulation in the mid-to-upper troposphere and low-level cyclonic flow that cut off moisture transport from the Gulf to the Plains, especially during the summer and autumn months.