Sydney Dust Storm - captured online

Today, 23 Sept Sydney woke up to an eerie dust storm - the red dust from the outback has been picked up by strong winds and blown across the country. Experts have attributed this to climate change and the ongoing drought afficting in Australia.

I picked up the above photo from the Guardian Online website, one of a gallery of amazing scenes. (You can check out the gallery by clicking on the pic alongside). Wanting to find out more- and especially how this phenomena is being covered online - I had a meander through the internet to see what else was out there.

There are a lot of home videos on Youtube, uploaded by Ozzies affected by the red storm - mainly shots of their backyard and local area. The most interesting video of the batch is a slideshow compilation of photos sent in to ABC Radio Australia by their listeners:

On Flickr, there’s also a group project on Flickr, “The Red Sydney Project - Dust Storm Days”. One of the group administrators explains on the group page:

“We awoke to an intense glow. We rose from our beds and we started shooting. This group is a collaborative effort to capture a virtual Sydney from Sept 23 - the morning when an eerie duststorm captivated thousands of digitial cameras across the city.We hope you’re enjoying the group photos, so far. The response has been tremendous and the photos are stunning. We welcome shots all shots from the dust storm including NSW, ACT and QLD.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed! 1000+ photos!”

Anyone who has a Flickr account can join the group and at the time of writing, there are 368 group members (up from 367 even as I was viewing the page!). The slideshow below shows the photos submitted by the members to the group pool:

There’s a map, too, showing where the photos were taken as well as a discussion forum.

For background information about the environmental conditions that caused the dust storm, The Sydney Morning Herald has a good slideshow with audio interviews on top explaining the issues. There’s no embed code for me to bring that over here so you’ll have to go over to their page for the meteorological backgruond.

Word based blogs have been secondary in this news event, with many of them posting Flickr items or linking to news reports (rather like me here on the other side of the world!). This is not surprising as the phenomena is obviously best captured visually. I’ve found a few brief blog accounts:

Silvermonk

Travelblog

Wedding Planning Tips

When I posted an link to the Guardian photo on Facebook, an Australian friend based in London added a comment to say that he’d been in touch with a friend in Sydney who reported that everything had cleared by midday and blue skies were back.