http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/06/atmospheric-science-overwhelmingly-white-black-scientists-have-ignited-change

Everything depended on finding the gigantic dust cloud. Seventeen years ago, a scientific crew set out on the Ron Brown, a gleaming U.S. research ship, in search of a plume of desert dust that had sheared off the Sahara and wafted over the Atlantic Ocean. Sailing from Barbados with day after day of clear sky, the crew was anxious about finding the dust storm. But that wasn’t the only thing weighing on Vernon Morris, the atmospheric chemist who’d organized the cruise, the first of its kind run largely by Black and Hispanic scientists. Failure could make life complicated for the atmospheric sciences program Morris had recently co-founded at Howard University. And, he says, “They would have never entrusted the ship to a bunch of Puerto Ricans and Blacks again.”

Finally, on the fifth morning, the crew awoke to an eclipse of dust. It settled on railings, instruments, and weather balloons. “We were just all giddy, the happiest scientists,” says Michelle Hawkins, a Howard graduate student at the time who now leads severe weather forecasts at the National Weather Service. The schedule was intense, as the crew launched weather balloons around the clock and took measurements in the ocean and at the surface to capture a picture of what turned out to be one of the largest Saharan plumes ever observed. And the cruise began a trend: The Aerosol and Ocean Science Expeditions (AEROSEs) have set out nearly every year since then, with the latest cruise defying the pandemic to sail in January.