Fun times in East Asia - Chinese Dust Storms

Not a good time to be living in Japan or Korea. From Reuters:

China's killer "yellow dust" hits Korea, Japan
South Korea closed schools on Monday and its factories producing memory chips stepped up safeguards, as a choking pall of sand mixed with toxic dust from China covered most of the country and other parts of Asia.

The annual "yellow dust" spring storms, which originate in China's Gobi Desert before sweeping south to envelop the Korean peninsula and parts of Japan, are blamed for scores of deaths and billions of dollars in damage every year in South Korea.

Some of the specific problems:

The sand storms have been increasing in frequency and toxicity over the years because of China's rapid economic growth and have added to increased tensions with neighbours South Korea and Japan over recent years.

The dust picks up heavy metals and carcinogens such as dioxin as it passes over Chinese industrial regions, before hitting North and South Korea and Japan, meteorologists say.

And:

The state-sponsored Korea Environment Institute said the dust kills up to 165 South Koreans a year, mostly the elderly or those with respiratory ailments, and makes as many as 1.8 million ill.

Annual economic damage to South Korea from the storms is estimated at up to 5.5 trillion won ($5.82 billion), according to the institute.

Hynix Semiconductor Inc, the world's second-biggest maker of memory chips, said it has had to step up its filtration systems and make employees take longer air showers to make sure the dust does not contaminate its production lines and damage chips, made using technology that operates on a microscopic level.

It's not just Japan and Korea though. Here is a 2001 NOAA story:

CHINA DUST STORM STRIKES USA
A dust storm that began two weeks ago on the Mongolian-China border reached the U.S. this week, blanketing areas from Canada to Arizona with a layer of dust. In Denver and along the foothills of the Rockies, the mountains were obscured by the haze.

Here is a photo from National Geographic of a 2006 storm in the Gansu Province of China: And all news accounts say that the problem is getting bigger...