Go outside – or just look out a window – and you’ll notice the sky looks odd. Apocalyptic, if you’re being dramatic. A little bit orange and dusky, if you’re being accurate.
No fear: it is not the end of days making itself known, nor is it dusk. At the time of writing, it’s 3:20PM, and the reason the sky has turned sort of rusty and weird is reportedly because Storm Ophelia has directed dust swept up over the Sahara desert and Southern Europe towards the UK.
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Dr Rob Thompson from the University of Reading’s meteorology department told the Croydon Advertiser: “It’s not that unusual; it happens quite regularly. Because of the way that Ophelia has tracked, it’s pulling a lot of dust up from the south […] There’s always dust in the atmosphere, but we find the Saharan dust is bigger than the normal stuff.”
The Met Office said it has received “several reports” of the sky going strange, and will likely receive quite a few more now everyone’s pouring out of their offices to try to take photos of something, it turns out, is actually quite hard to photograph with a phone.
Here, some attempts: