Vehicles covered in orange dust, subway corridors with sand and a red-tinged sky: a large cloud of dust from the Sahara hung over Madrid and much of Spain on the night from Monday to Tuesday.
People hosing their cars, terraces or building portals could be seen in the heart of the Spanish capital, where this fine ochre dust transformed the landscape.
In the subway and parking lots the floors were dusty and the windows on the top floors of the buildings showed brown spots.
This meteorological phenomenon, of strong hot winds laden with sand dust from the Sahara Desert, is called calima in Spain. It is quite common, especially in the Atlantic archipelago of the Canary Islands, located in northwestern Africa.
The current one is an “extraordinary episode of haze with very significant reductions in visibility in large areas of the peninsula,” Rubén del Campo, spokesperson for the State Meteorological Agency (Aemet), explained in a message to journalists, which affects “cities as distant as Granada (south), Madrid (center) and León (northwest).”
It will be persistent, as “it is expected that dust will continue to arrive in large quantities during the remainder of Tuesday the 15th and during Wednesday 16th” and extensive: “in the next few hours it will reach areas as far away from the Sahara” as the Netherlands and Germany, Del Campo said.
Storms in the Sahara Desert create gusts of wind on the ground surface, which lift up particles of sand and dust, Aemet explained in a video on Twitter.
The smallest particles are suspended in the air thanks to the difference in temperature between the hot air in height and the ground that is cooled, while the heaviest ones fall, according to the institution.
Then the wind transports the particles to the Iberian Peninsula, where it is not ruled out that there will be “mud rains” over Spain, if haze meets rainfall, Aemet warned.
Air quality was “extremely unfavorable” Tuesday morning in Madrid, Segovia or Ávila, in the center of the country, according to authorities.
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