Clear Air After the Dust Storm

You'll all no doubt know about the dust storm that blew up out of South Australia and turned Sydney into the heartland of the apocalypse.

I was out walking the dogs on the far side of Mount Coot-tha when it blew up the coast and arrived in Brisbane, and wishing to avoid hyperbolae, it was grey rather than red at that point and resembled an overcast day.

As the day progressed though it got a bit of a reddish tinge and as I was driving home the strange thing was seeing the sun reflected on cars and seeing that it was blue... or to be pernickerty cyan.

My own pet theory on the colour of the sun is that its light was having the red part of its spectrum scattered by the reddish dust, leaving the blue+green (which together make cyan) to reach our eyes. Could be nonsense. Probably isn't.

Anyway visibility was dropping and I got the idea of tripping up to the Glass House Mountains to get some moody shots of mountains poking out of the dust and disappearing into the dusty mist.

No such luck. I looked out from Maleny to see nothing whatsoever. Visibility was down to about 300 metres at that point. The air was very dry, kind of reminiscent of floors having been sanded a couple of days ago but left unvarnished.

So I tootled back to Brisbane thinking visibility might have cleared a bit down there, but it hadn't.

So it was a bit of a washout really.

Today we woke up to find that the air was clear once again, with a light coating of dust prevalent on most surfaces. I drove up to Mount Glorious to see if the sunset would be a blinder, and maybe it was a bit redder, maybe it wasn't. It was quite pretty though.