The Sahara desert is experiencing a huge dust storm that has swirled over to Europe. People are finding it hard to breathe in large parts of Spain for a second straight day on Wednesday. Cleaning crews were assigned extra work as far away as Paris, London and Belgrade to remove the film of dirt falling on cars and buildings.?
Europeans are waking up to eerie skies, from the grimy grey in Madrid to orange-hues in the Swiss Alps, caused by the tiny particles that had travelled thousands of kilometres across the Mediterranean Sea.?
The European Union's Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service said it was tracking the large mass of dust that has "degraded air quality across large parts of Spain, Portugal and France."?
"This is an intense event, but this type of event typically occurs once or twice a year, normally in February or March, when a low-pressure system over Algeria and Tunisia gathers up dust and carries it north to Europe. Dust can reach the U.K., or even Iceland, as it did last year," Carlos Perez Garcia, a researcher studying atmospheric dust at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, told The Associated Press.?
Photos and videos of the dust went viral on social media which also show snowboarders cutting perfect white lines through the red-tinged snow in the Pyrenees Mountains.?
Sam Esteve, a double European champion and the In Pow We Trust snowboarding crew took some photos and videos of themselves surfing down the sand-dusted mountain.??
Ruben del Campo, the spokesman for Spain's weather service, said that the largest quantities of air-born dust will accumulate on Wednesday afternoon in Spain's southeast and central regions.?
"The air will then begin to clear little by little, although some floating dust will reach the Canary Islands (in the Atlantic Ocean) over the weekend," Del Campo said.?
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