re: anybody noticing the sahara dust?

Pretty interesting stuff about this cloud.
A large reason the Amazon rainforest is so lush and fecund is because of this dust cloud. The majority of it is from the historical bed of Lake Chad which at one point covered 400,000mi^2 (by comparison, all the great lakes combined cover 94,000mi^2). So this dust is very nutrient rich, it's not just sand. Due to the large amount of rain in the Amazon, nutrients get leached/washed away. Without this dust cloud fertilizing the area the size of the rainforest would be greatly reduced.
Also, the cloud size affects the surface temperature of the Atlantic and years with large dust clouds tend to be years with fewer and smaller hurricanes.