Effect of the 1950s large-scale migration for land reclamation on spring dust storms in Northwest China

During the 1950s, China experienced large-scale human migration for the purposes of land reclamation, industrialization, and construction in Northwest China, with a peak of nearly 70 million migrants in 1959 during the Great Leap Forward period. These intense human activities were responsible for the 1950s’ dust storms in Northwest China. Due to large-scale reclamations, the number of spring dust storm days did not show much relationship with the number of spring strong wind days in the Tarim Basin and the Hexi Corridor, but they did correlate with the increase in annual land reclamation areas, with correlation coefficients of 0.82 and 0.88, respectively, in the two regions. Indeed, severe dust storm outbreaks (visibility less than 200 m) in Xinjiang, Gansu and Qinghai provinces in Northwest China were also found to be positively correlated with the number of annual immigrants and the annual increase in cultivated land areas in the period 1953–1968, with coefficients of 0.62 and 0.65, respectively.