African dust has turned European ski resorts into a desert

At the beginning of the week, on March 14-15, a plume of dust from the Sahara Desert crossed the Mediterranean Sea and reached Western Europe. Shrouded in an orange shroud, the sky and earth resembled a Martian landscape. And Spanish and French ski resorts have turned from a snow fairy tale into a sandy desert.

To clean the dusty streets of Madrid, workers hosed them down. Sugar dust was also visible on parked cars.

The spread of the African plume to the north was associated with an atmospheric jet stream formed due to the storm "Celia". On Monday, a cloud of dust covered Spain, and in the following days it was already observed over Portugal, France, Switzerland and Italy. By the middle of the week, satellites recorded fragments of the plume in Greece and in the south of the UK, where dust particles combined with raindrops.

In Spain and Portugal, due to the dust invasion, air pollution reached dangerous levels on Tuesday. In France, the air was not dusted so much thanks to the Pyrenees Mountains, covering the country from the south, which partially prevented the spread and deposition of solid particles.