Red-orange Saharan dust covers Spain, spreads out across Europe

A huge dust storm swirling over Europe from the Sahara desert made it hard to breathe in large parts of Spain and gave cleaning crews extra work as far away as Paris, London and Belgrade to remove the film of dirt falling on cars and buildings.

Europeans this week have woken up to eerie skies, from the grimy grey in Madrid to orange-hues in the Swiss Alps, caused by the tiny particles that had travelled thousands of kilometres across the Mediterranean Sea.

The European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service said it was tracking the large mass of dust that has “degraded air quality across large parts of Spain, Portugal and France”.

While Spain is bearing the brunt of the storm, dust was flung far beyond, dumping ochre-coloured blobs on cars in a rainy Paris and sifting a fine powder down on a huge swathe of the continent.

Experts, including Spain’s national weather service, described the event as “extraordinary” for the amount of dust in the air but noted that it had not broken any records.

“This is an intense event, but this type of event typically occurs once or twice a year, normally in February or March, when a low-pressure system over Algeria and Tunisia gathers up dust and carries it north to Europe. Dust can reach the UK, or even Iceland, as it did last year,” Carlos Perez Garcia, a researcher studying atmospheric dust at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, said.