Sep 22, 2009 8:53 PM

Reader Photo Gallery: Crazy Dust Storm Turns Sydney Red

Dust storms swept over Sydney Wednesday morning, turning the city sky so red, some residents thought they’d left the blue planet. “It was like waking up on Mars,” Sydney resident Marcus Schappi wrote in an e-mail to Wired.com. Residents of eastern Australia have had to battle these bizarre conditions, because strong winds from the dry […]

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Dust storms swept over Sydney Wednesday morning, turning the city sky so red, some residents thought they'd left the blue planet.

"It was like waking up on Mars," Sydney resident Marcus Schappi wrote in an e-mail to Wired.com.

Residents of eastern Australia have had to battle these bizarre conditions, because strong winds from the dry interior swept up dust and brought it gusting into the city.

“An intense north low pressure area formed and generated gale-force westerly winds during yesterday, and those winds picked up a lot of dust from the very dry interior of the continent,” Barry Hanstrum, New South Wales regional director at the Bureau of Meteorology, told Bloomberg.

Even though they knew what was happening, the strangeness of the event understandably caught Sydneysiders off guard. A Twitter hashtag to track the event, #sydneyduststorm, quickly appeared. One @wiredscience follower on Twitter declared it "a leeetle apocalyptic," and none of them had ever experienced dust storms of a comparable intensity in their lifetimes. Perhaps the only similar event in recent Australian history was a massive dust storm in Melbourne in 1983.

In other areas of southern Australia like Broken Hill — well inland in western New South Wales — the storms have been even more intense. Dust storms have occasionally blacked out the sky, as you can see in this incredible video.

While the immediate cause of the craziness was the wind, it's difficult to know if there were underlying changes in Australia's climate that contributed to the storm.

It's impossible to attribute the freak storm directly to climate change, said climatologist Kevin Hennessy, lead author of the chapter on Australia in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

"You can't really link any individual extreme weather event to climate change," Hennessy said. "It's much more complicated than that."

But the 13-year drought that eastern Australia has been experiencing created the dusty conditions that made the storm possible. And the drought appears linked to global warming. The IPCC summary of impacts on Australia noted with high confidence that regional climate change had occurred in the country. Since 1950, there has been 0.4 to 0.7 Celsius degrees warming and "less rain in southern and eastern Australia."

While many of the pictures streaming out of Sydney show the blood-red sky of the morning, as the day has worn on, the sky has lightened considerably. By late morning, the sky was more sepia, @wiredscience followers, @wilko64 and @heathergracious informed us.

We've collected photos from our Down Under readers down under. We thank them all for their quick responses to our Tweets from @wiredscience. The top image was shot by Andrew Muller and posted to his flickr account.