By now, everyone’s heard about the dust storm.  Apparently, this sort of thing never happens - I saw a quote in the news that one guy said he saw one about 40 years ago in Adelaide, and my husband said he had never seen or heard of this happening before.  So that should give you an idea of how confused we were when we woke up and the air was bright orange.

T woke me up at 6am and said “Look outside, it looks weird.”  I glanced up at the window and said, “It’s just the sunrise.”  He said, “No, get up and look.”  It looked like this:

We couldn’t imagine what it was.  I thought that it was the sunrise filtering through a heavy fog, even though that didn’t seem plausible.  T opened the window to take pictures, and after a minute we were like, “Hm, it smells like chalk.”  Now that we know what it was, it seems really obvious, but we couldn’t imagine why an orange fog would smell like chalk, so he went downstairs to Google what was happening, and that’s when we found out and decided to close the windows right back up.

Filed in Weather (& hemispheres) on Thursday, September 24, 2009 ·