There’s been quite a bit of buzz about the dust storm in Australia that hit Queensland, New South Wales, and NSW city Sydney on September 23rd. Pictures like the ones below have been all over the web.
Left: National Post Tim Wimborne/Reuters, Right: Examiner.com AP Photo/Rob Griffith
But it is the photos taken from space that are the most interesting I think. NASA’s Earth Observatory captured a truly amazing photo that shows the dust storm front as it swept across the continent and headed out to sea over eastern Australia where the borders of Queensland and NSW meet.
That dust headed to sea has an unappreciated benefit – it will fertilize the ocean with its mineral rich dust. There may be some interesting blooms of sea life in the weeks to come.
There’s also a cool Google Earth KML file to download and use with the space imagery.
download Google Earth file (1 KB, KML)
Here’s what the Google Earth file will do – overlay the cities and borders. This is a very wide zoom from Brisbane to Sydney. Using the Google Earth KML file and zooming in further yields much more detail.
NASA narrative for this image: A wall of dust stretched from northern Queensland to the southern tip of eastern Australia on the morning of September 23, 2009, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this image. The dust is thick enough that the land beneath it is not visible. The storm, the worst in 70 years, led to canceled or delayed flights, traffic problems, and health issues, reported the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) News. The concentration of particles in the air reached 15,000 micrograms per cubic meter in New South Wales during the storm, said ABC News. A normal day sees a particle concentration 10-20 micrograms per cubic meter.
Strong winds blew the dust from the interior to more populated regions along the coast. In this image, the dust rises in plumes from point sources and concentrates in a wall along the front of the storm. The large image shows that some of the point sources are agricultural fields, recognizable by their rectangular shape. Australia has suffered from a multiple-year drought, and much of the dust is coming from fields that have not been planted because of the drought, said ABC News.
References
- The high-resolution image provided above is at MODIS’ full spatial resolution (level of detail) of 250 meters per pixel. The MODIS Rapid Response System provides this image at additional resolutions.
- Australian Broadcasting Corporation News. (2009, September 23). Dust settles as storm rolls north. Accessed September 23, 2009.
- NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center. Caption by Holli Riebeek.
As WUWT reader Keith Minto writes:
This is the best image I can find of the dust storm that passed over eastern Australia. NASA has images from 12 Sept showing it coming from Lake Eyre. Apparently when lakes dry after having water they leave behind very fine particles that is carried up & stays up. Seems that this is a world wide phenomenon, when lakes fill and empty completely and nothing to do with the dreaded Climate Change. In other words, if the lakes did not fill, and the drought was worse, then this might not have happened! Pity the newspapers did not report this….took me all of 5minutes to piece this together. The earlier image shows the dust originating in Lake Eyre and moving east out into the Tasman sea towards New Zealand, and as far as the media was concerned it did not happen. It’s the old story, if an event does not touch large cities it is a non event.
Sept 12th MODIS image from NASA showing dust from Lake Eyre:
http://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/individual.php?db_date=2009-09-21
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Got as far as New Zealand;
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-world/aussie-dust-storm-settles-on-new-zealand-20090925-g605.html
These Monster storms definitely are unprecedented
http://blogs.news.com.au/images/uploads/anothersydneyday.jpg
Dr A Burns (13:12:00) :
You are probably wrong to state that “Land clearing has effected 70% of Australia.” Firstly, I think you mean “affected”. Then you do not say how the land was affected. Then you should do as I have had to do, fly for endless hours at Mach .75 or so, observing for hours at a time the lack of disturbance by man. North of the Tropic, roughly half of Australia, and West of the Great Divide, leaving a bit under half, the signs of land clearing are rare indeed. There is no timber industry because the termites eat the trees before harvest time. There is an occasional farming experiment like Ord River and Tipperary Downs, but these are tiny. So we have already accounted more more than 30% as unaffected, without even bothering about sub-tropical South Australia and Eastern West Australia beyond the wheat belt.
My guess is that 70% of Australia is UNAFFECTED by land clearing.
Study: Dust Storms Are Electric
Larry O’Hanlon, Discovery News
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2006/08/17/dust_pla.html?category=earth&guid=20060817101500
Geoff,
There’s plenty of web links claiming 70% land clearing but I have no idea how they do their sums. There’s even this: “For the year of 1990, land clearing in Australia totalled more than half of that which was cleared in Brazilian Amazonia.” http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/good_wood/lnd_cl.htm
What hasn’t been cleared by man directly for farming or grazing, has probably been effected by rabbits and other ferals introduced by man.
70% wouldn’t surprise me but even 30% is shameful, especially considering that much of what is left is land that is too poor for agriculture.
It’s also interesting looking at Lake Eyre on google Earth … it looks white with salt, rather than red.
Flying Binghi
The harshness of the Aussie climate seems a surprise to those brought up on ‘Neighbours’ which appears to be most climate scientists as they appear to have absolutely no grasp of history, and think these sort of events are unprecedented.
This is the Australian year book listing natural disasters
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/ABS@ur momisugly.nsf/7d12b0f6763c78caca257061001cc588/fecb2ab6de16171eca2570de0005871b!OpenDocument
which includes a dust storm in Feb 1983 in Melbourne with a photo remarkably like that shown here.
Dorethea Mckellar wrote elequently of the harshness of the Australian climate in ‘My country.’
http://www.imagesaustralia.com/mycountry.htm
tonyb
Geoff,
‘Firstly, I think you mean “affected” ‘
I’m surprised to see such pedantry in a forum such as this but I did intend “effect”. Both effect and affect may be used as nouns or verbs. Here’s a short explanation, although I can copy from my Shorter Oxford if you wish:
“The noun effect means “result, consequence”: the serious effects of the oil spill. The noun affect1 pronounced with the stress on the first syllable, is a technical term in psychology and psychiatry.”
Dr A Burns (18:09:39) : “…Both effect and affect may be used as nouns or verbs.”
Quite so, but the meaning of “effected” is different from “affected.” And I think you can expect pedantry wherever people with doctorates congregate.
When I was of Uni age it was not long after WWII and many families were poor. It was rare for a person to continue to a PhD. Most who did won scholarships. I won a couple, but only enough to get me to Master’s thesis stage.
I have a school report from when I was 8 years old, saying “Number in class, 58. Position in class, 1. Comment: Works well, but is inclined to wriggle”. How many pupils in a class become too many for the teachers of today? 20?
However, we managed to spell and to count and to use proper grammar better then later generations, expecially Generation X (whom I name Gen XXOS). Text message spelling remains alien to me.
The mentality of text message spelling is not dissimilar to the science of many climatologists, with their unstudied “near enough will do” attitude. I was belted several times because I did not take care to handwrite “w” well enough for the teacher.
Some of the people reporting above, about the dust storm in east Australia, are in need of a good belting. For some of those referenced, the scholarship and research is almost nil and the observation is often inaccurate. Experience? Who needs it when you can Google or go to Wikipedia (a site that I now boycott because of its mistake rate and overbearing censorship; and which perhaps should be “Wikipaedia” ).
It makes me weep to read of the degradation of Mitchell Taylor in Anthony’s post with Joanne Nova “Wandering the climate desert in exile.” In some countries people with experience are used for reference and it sometimes proves useful.
In my experience, 70% of the land area of Australia has NOT been affected by land clearing. The figure is much smaller. It’s dogma like “Radioactive waste has to be managed for 250,000 years”.
On Google Earth, an empty Lake Eyre does look whitish because that is the colour of the evaporite crystals like salt and gypsum. Very little iron is soluble by comparison and iron-coloured sediment layers, if they form, settle first after a lake filling and are covered by the later precipitation of the whitish salts as the water evaporates. .
Geoff Sherington (22:37:05),
You make some valid comments especially about using the web as a source of material. I was frustrated at the poor images in the media and asked my self ‘where did the dust come from and what shape, height, depth speed did it take?’. In the end it seems to be embedded in a cold front and as a result the shape depends upon which section of the dust ‘tube’ you are looking at. The media only selected a small section to publish. This is when I searched the Aqua high resolution images that provided images of almost the entire coiled front. These images were spectacular so I sent them off to my children, and, as an afterthought,to WUWT. The beauty of the web is the rapid speed that ideas can be transmitted, a weeks digestion of correct research to get every fact right would loose spontaneity,and,given the nature of the event, it would certainly be old news.
On a lighter note, I was wondering how New Zealand was coping with the dust and knowing the typical NZ/Australia rivalry, the NZ press did not disappoint. “Dirty dust from Australia heads to NZ”, and, wait for it ” Radio active dust from Woomera heads towards NZ”. They are lucky we do not charge them for it.
The Tabloids and old rivalries are alive and living.
This climate change is real enough for me
After giving up in a long battle with some diehards and less sensitive nature observers I decided to peek at blogsphere again for a fresh impression of the old bandwagon on this dust storm event given its as big as it is. Yes; the thing swept half a continent coast to coast and it’s still going on I fear.
Minutes ago I took more photos of the fresh red muck still accumulating on the lid of a spare washing machine stored temporarily down under in my carport. That’s after I completely wiped it all off two days ago when the rain turned it all back into a liquid like external house paint. However these suspended solids I find are so fine they could have first been made airborne by “normal” evaporation anywhere outback
What’s probably most different about the rapid evaporation of our formally long sheets of muddy water flowing inland is the intense air streams associated with a particularly deep low pressure region out in the Tasman sea and dare I say, we have seen quite a few of those in recent years. More importantly, some of us locals can see the same link with the early bushfire season this time round.
Those considerate souls interested in assessing the history of man’s impact on the local climate via the creation of mighty dust storms etc should look at the books about the soldier settler programs and the wholesale clearing of the Mallee country in Victoria.
Governments too are slow in their reaction to a problem of their creation.
Jorgek, Geoff and any other affected grammatical pedants,
My initial statement was ” … feral species have also had a devastating effect on vegetation.”
This use of “effect” in this context is as a noun, not a verb. It means, to quote my Shorter Oxford:
” Something accomplished, caused or produced; a result, a consequence. …”
“… KOESTLER. Liquor did not seem to have a stimulating effect on him.”
My usage is clearly correct.
Forums on English usage would be a better place for such discussions.
Oh no radioactive dust coming!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8277924.stm
I have been in 2 such ripper dustbaths. one in about? 64 in Alice springs, and one, where in a car, we could not see the end of the bonnet! OR the semi trailer we were directly behind doing idle crawl speed, only when he touched his brakes could we see a glimmer…where was that? Adelaide on the Bushfire day, (wed? 83?) can,t remember. It went from 40C, and fires in the hills to a dustbath, and then 2?hrs later a 15C drop almost instantly, followed by rain.
70% of the settled lands may have been cleared, the outback certainly has not been, if the feral goats camels and whatever, inc rabbits werent there, the Roos would be even more plentiful! and they can eat a massive amount, thanks very much…ask a farmer!
Lake Eyre was already dry as is normal, the ABC have a clip showing many of the pelicans that hatched, already dead from the fish and water dryout.
Inconvenient truth is it is normal and well documented!
I have had a gutful of climate change crap! come in Spinner!
ozspeaksup,
I’ve also “had a gutful of climate change crap!”
Do you have any evidence that ferals and introduced species such as sheep, do no more damage than Australian native animals ?
“Do you have any evidence that ferals and introduced species such as sheep, do no more damage than Australian native animals ?”
Livestock is generally contained, if nothing else. Try to keep a kangaroo or emu contained – You need a fence strong & tall enough that it makes an elephant think twice (well, for the big red roos anyway). We’re also limited in the amount that can be “controlled” by a wildlife tagging system. A property might only be allowed to shoot 1-200 animals per year one year, but none the next (doesn’t help when the property might have 3500 kangaroos running wild on the property).
Livestock also don’t eat a lot of the natural flora this far out, hence the reliance on introduced pastures or forage crops.
Camels, rabbits and other introduced pests are a different kettle of fish. They still do a fair amount of destruction and eat anything, but they’re generally shot on sight, so their numbers are limited in all but the remotest areas.
Of course I have no scientific “evidence” on this; it’s all just an opinion. An opinion that’s based on the experience of living a lifetime in the Outback, which is sadly something that most meddling misfit environmental extremists & wildly enthusiastic journalists don’t have & can thus never understand.
On topic, last weekend saw another dust storm and the one I drove through last night turned out to be a fizzer.
As a tailpiece to this event, Dust Watch produced this interesting .pdf.,including a discussion of land management practices.
They found most of the dust came from Lake Eyre Basin, Channel country of South East Queensland and North West NSW.
It is at http://65.55.40.199
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