A hellish dust storm caused a “red wave” of sand off the coast of Western Australia on Wednesday.
Tugboat workers near the coastal town of Onslow snapped photos on their phones as they watched the towering dust storm pass over calm ocean waters.
“I’ve never seen anything like it, it was pretty special and it was definitely an eerie feeling,” Brett Martin, a tugboat worker, told The West Australian.
Mother Nature started working at sunset. A thunderstorm with gusts of up to 75 mph picked up sand and dust as it swept over Onslow and toward the Indian Ocean. The dust storm, called a haboob by meteorologists, raged for an hour. After that, the water was calm.
PHOTOS: GIANT HABOOB SWEEPS THROUGH ARIZONA
Isaac Kneipp, chief officer on a tugboat that was moored 17 miles north of Onslow, told The West Australian that he’d never seen anything like Wednesday’s storm.
“I have been at sea for 15 years and I’ve been through dozens of cyclones and heavy weather but this is one of the most visually spectacular I have seen,” he said.
Haboobs are common in deserts in the southwestern U.S., according to Jonathan Erdman, a meteorologist for The Weather Channel. They start out as thunderstorms in higher terrain. As precipitation falls out of the thunderstorm, the water is evaporated by dry air near the lowest layers of the atmosphere. This leads to strong winds that pick up and carry dust.
Rob Morton, a spokesperson for the Australian governent’s Bureau of Meteorology, said that no one was hurt after Wednesday’s haboob.
“We are unaware of any damage or injury caused by the storm, but such storms can e quite terrifying and dangerous,” Morton told the New York Daily News in an emailed statement.
Still, the dust storm astonished Erdman, who has been a meteorologist for 18 years.
“I’ve never seen a white shelf cloud capping the brownish dirt from the haboob,” Erdman told Weather.com. “If there was a hall of fame for weather photos, this one would get in on the first ballot.”
Only a few weeks into 2013, the weather Down Under is already breaking records. A scorching heat wave settled over parts of the country, causing at least 200 wildfires in the southeast. Four of the country’s hottest days on record have been in 2013. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology had to add two extra colors to its temperature maps, a deep purple and pink that can record temperatures up to 129.2 degrees Fahrenheit, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.
Wednesday’s haboob was not related to Tropical Cyclone Narelle, which is currently building on Australia’s west coast.
