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Greece: Orange Sahara dust haze descends over Athens

April 24, 2024

Greece: Orange Sahara dust haze descends over Athens

AFP People sit on Tourkovounia hill overlooking the city of Athens, as southerly winds carry waves of Saharan dust to the city, in Athens, on April 23, 2024AFP
Despite the beauty of the orange hue over Athens, the clouds of dust left many Greeks suffering from respiratory problems

A dramatic orange haze has descended over Athens as clouds of dust have blown in from the Sahara desert.

It is one of the worst such episodes to hit Greece since 2018, according to officials.

Greece had already been struck by similar clouds in late March and early April, which also covered areas of Switzerland and southern France.

The skies are predicted to clear on Wednesday, says Greece’s weather service.

Air quality has deteriorated in many areas of the country and on Wednesday morning the Acropolis in Athens was no longer visible because of the dust. The cloud has reached as far north as Thessaloniki.

Greeks with respiratory conditions have been urged to limit the time they spend outdoors, wear protective masks and avoid taking physical exercise until the dust clouds clear.

EPA People stroll while African dust covers the sky of Athens, GreeceEPA
Greek skies were expected to clear on Wednesday

The Sahara releases 60 to 200 million tonnes of mineral dust per year.

Most of the dust quickly descends to Earth, but some of the small particles can travel huge distances, sometimes reaching Europe.

The atmosphere especially in southern Greece has become stifling because of the combination of dust and high temperatures.

Meteorologist Kostas Lagouvardos compared the view from one weather station to the planet Mars.

The fire service on Tuesday reported 25 wildfires in the past 24 hours. One fire broke out near a naval base on the island of Crete – where temperatures soared above 30C (86F) – and homes and a kindergarten had to be evacuated, according to local reports.

AFP via Getty Images A man takes a photograph of the city of AthensAFP via Getty Images

Dust plumes from the Sahara are not uncommon across Europe and can vary in intensity, however, they tend to occur most often during the spring and autumn.

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Solar panels in Sahara could boost renewable energy but damage the global climate – here’s why

February 15, 2021

The world’s most forbidding deserts could be the best places on Earth for harvesting solar power – the most abundant and clean source of energy we have. Deserts are spacious, relatively flat, rich in silicon – the raw material for the semiconductors from which solar cells are made — and never short of sunlight. In fact, the ten largest solar plants around the world are all located in deserts or dry regions.

Researchers imagine it might be possible to transform the world’s largest desert, the Sahara, into a giant solar farm, capable of meeting four times the world’s current energy demand. Blueprints have been drawn up for projects in Tunisia and Morocco that would supply electricity for millions of households in Europe.

While the black surfaces of solar panels absorb most of the sunlight that reaches them, only a fraction (around 15%) of that incoming energy gets converted to electricity. The rest is returned to the environment as heat. The panels are usually much darker than the ground they cover, so a vast expanse of solar cells will absorb a lot of additional energy and emit it as heat, affecting the climate.

If these effects were only local, they might not matter in a sparsely populated and barren desert. But the scale of the installations that would be needed to make a dent in the world’s fossil energy demand would be vast, covering thousands of square kilometres. Heat re-emitted from an area this size will be redistributed by the flow of air in the atmosphere, having regional and even global effects on the climate.

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‘It Looks Like Mars’ – Saharan Dust-pocalypse Blankets Europe

February 9, 2021

‘It Looks Like Mars’ – Saharan Dust-pocalypse Blankets Europe

A significant intrusion of Saharan-desert dust has blanketed parts of Europe this week, with tremendous impacts on the environment, health, and power generation, according to Bloomberg.

The sand and dust storm began on Feb. 5 in northern Algeria. Dust particles were whipped up into the atmosphere and eventually transported to southeast Spain and southern and central Europe. Already, snow-covered mountains on the Pyrenees and Alps mountains have been coated with dust, buildings and cars have been covered in dust, and the skies in some parts of Europe have been transformed into a yellowish-orange tint.

“We saw air quality values in the affected regions drop significantly,” said Mark Parrington, a scientist at the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS). “The impact of the Saharan dust clouds is clearly visible for affected cities, such as, for example, Barcelona or Marseille.”

Scientists at CAMS estimated that several micrograms of dust particles per square meter were dumped over Europe since late last week.

“Our forecasts, even those from Feb. 2, were very reliable in describing the size and extent of the dust plume as well as its development and direction,” Parrington said. Utility companies that use Copernicus data had to alter power generation during the dust storm as solar energy was dramatically reduced. Even airlines had to fly different routes because of low visibility.

Pictures posted by The Guardian show the extent of dust that was dumped across Europe in the last couple of days.

Skiers at the Alpine resort of Anzere, Switzerland, were greeted with dust-covered snow over the weekend.

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