Early in the week, on March 14–15, a dust plume from the Sahara desert crossed the Mediterranean and reached Western Europe. The sky and earth shrouded in an orange veil resembled a Martian landscape. And the Spanish and French ski resorts have turned from a snowy fairy tale into a sandy desert.
To clean the dusty streets of Madrid, workers hosed them down. Saharan dust was also visible on parked cars.
The spread of the African plume to the north was associated with an atmospheric jet stream formed due to the Celia storm. On Monday, a cloud of dust covered Spain, and in the following days it was already observed over Portugal, France, Switzerland and Italy. By mid-week, satellites picked up fragments of the plume in Greece and southern Britain, where dust particles merged with raindrops.
In Spain and Portugal, a dust invasion pushed air pollution to dangerous levels on Tuesday. In France, the air was not so dusty thanks to the Pyrenees that close the country from the south, which partially prevented the spread and settling of particulate matter.
