It's a lot redder than coffee down the road at Kingscliff Lyn. I've never seen anything like it before. The smell of dust is strong and you can't see the sun at all.

I'm sure Bolt and Blair will be along soon with some fun stories about a record cold morning somewhere in Peru.

It's dirty orange here now too. You can't blame the more susceptible for thinking it's the apocalypse.

I've never seen anything like it either and the smell is amazing. We can see the sun, but it's blue. It looks like a full moon.

bugger of a day to be a bird.

The Sydney Dust Storm Project on Flickr.

It shouldn't be just Sydney given it started in SA rolled through the town of Broken Hill in western NSW before hitting Sydney this morning and then Brisbane. In Broken Hill it turned black.

On the social network mainstream media relationship News Ltd's gallery of photos relied on reader's camera phones and cameras. Is there any reason for us to turn to the news media any more?

The micro-blogging platform Twitter has become the breakthrough social media tool for journalists, as they use it to cross-promote their own stories, comment on others, connect with contacts outside their usual silos and accumulate followers.It has become as a way to publish news briefs from events one is observing or participating in--the dust storm--- to share links to stories that are deemed significant etc. Twitter has become embedded as a component of the media's breaking news coverage.

Ken,
you forgot about Miranda Devine pointing to the greenies carrying on about climate change.

2 points, both off topic [well one clearly is and the other apparently so].
1.Gary have you read this?
http://www.ramsar.org/cda/ramsar/display/main/main.jsp?zn=ramsar&cp=1-26-45-85%5E16211_4000_0__
2.There seems to be an,may I call it, 'obsession' with how pretty and photogenic the event is rather than what is causing it, apart from the unususal extreme pressure pattern, and what this event may be hinting to us about our land management practices.

fred,
nope I haven't read the Ramsar wetland report by Jamie Pittockrom the Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University. Thanks. I'll have a read.

Yeah the images are photogenic as they are well composed ----but the Broken Hill video is not. It's raw.

People in the metropolis are disconnected from the land and wouldn't really know how much it has been damaged.

I remember when I was a kid, we had a lot of dust storms like that in Adelaide. My ex-missus had similar stories from her childhood in Broken Hill. Adelaide doesn't get them so often now, because minimum till farming is widely practiced.

It's been amusing watching how this has been discussed around the traps. There's been a fair bit of Crocodile Dundee-type 'that's not a dust storm, this is a dust storm' stuff, the usual state vs state and city vs rural, 'how come it's news now that it's hit Sydney'.

I've been wondering the same thing as Fred and Gary. Put aside the hilarity over the susceptible waking up to the rapture, and I haven't seen a lot of contemplation over the circumstances that cause truckloads of topsoil to be dumped on the metropolis.

It's as much a wake up call for farming practices as anything else. Tomorrow morning Sydney siders will be hosing half the arable land down the drain. But most of the comment I've seen from country people has been along the lines of 'What's the big deal? This happens every day.'

fred,
there is an account of the origins of the dust storm here on ABC Science. Associate Professor Michael Box of the School of Physics at University of New South Wales says:

The Lake Eyre Basin area of central Australia is a dusty place, especially in early spring. Dust storms originating in this region are common, although it is far less common that the dust is carried the 1500 km to Sydney, and beyond. However, with winds of sufficient strength and the right direction dust may be carried off the Australian coast - even as far as New Zealand. You often get these dust storm events after you've had wetter years.After you've had decent rains like we had last year, you get flood waves moving through central Australia. These deposit lots of fine material and once this dries out it easily gets entrained by the wind."

The role of dust in climate modelling is still a large unknown.