MY sister came home from school with the information that we should take anything that could be damaged inside and batten down the hatches. Apparantly there’s going to be the biggest dust storm for 40 years. She’s a bit of a panic monger so I took it with a grain of salt.
But dusk has a strange brown colour to it tonight…
Hmmm. After checking on the news it seems that all I have to look forward to is decreased visibility and dust in the air. So much for the gale force winds of my sister’s imagination.
Looks like the biggest (or one of the biggest) in recorded history. It had a 1 500km (900mi.) front, and hit Sydney this morning. I don’t think we got the worst of it. I just saw that the overcast had a reddish tinge to it, and assumed there was a big bushfire nearby (the sky looked the same as it did in last year’s Black Christmas). It must be coming across at an angle if Brisbane’s only getting it now, but it’s heading east. the NSw part has gone out to sea.
Link.
It’s going to be a long, dry summer.
Can we trade some or our Torontonian cold and rain for some of your heat and dryness? 
And it’s supposed to snow tonight in Michigan. Glad to know the awful weather is a worldwide phenomenon.
Silentgoldfish do NOT run the airconditioner through your duststorm. Even if the air is slightly dusty, you will cause a lot of harm to the intakes.
Many moons ago (1983 IIRC) there was a severe duststorm in Melbourne that occurred during the mid-afternoon. It was so bad that the street lights came on. People who had set their aircon to come on a few hours before they got home found that when they did get home, their aircon was basically ruined with all of the dust. It took many, many months for the limited number of aircon repair people to get around to everyone, so they suffered withour aircom for ages.
Also, watch out if you suffer asthma.
According the BoM report last night on ABC774, the size of the duststorm is around the same size as Victoria, and in some areas visibility was down to 100 meters. No idea what the wind speeds where, but you may want to check for leaks under doors and windows to try and avoid the dust getting in anyways.
It was pretty much a non-event. Last night visibility was down to the end of the block, but since it was night time anyway it wasn’t exactly limiting. Other than the smell of dirt everywhere it may as well have been brown fog. Today it seems to be gone, the only reminder being the thin layer of dust on my car.
And I was so looking forward to pretending I lived on Dune. 
Caught@Work, I don’t have an air conditioner unfortunately. Very unfortunately. It’s 35 degrees today. My sister did get a nosebleed last night cause of all the dust in the air though.
It was pretty dusty here in Logan. There’s not been too much damage though. There’s still dust in the air and it’s freaking hot!
TLD that’s a horrific storm though. 1500 km long! Yikes.
The idiot politician who was speechifying at the naturalisation ceremony where Mr P and the P.florets were being naturalisated into Aussies last night made the incredibly unfunny joke that we were all going to gain 10 metres of topsoil on our gardens over night. If only.
He also made the screamingly unfunny joke about how if Australia opened the floodgates, we’d have thousands of people trying to become citizens and so all these new citizens were oh-so-lucky. I’m trying to find how who the hell he was so I can be careful not to vote for him.
Gah. How do these people get voted in?