Brisbane Duststorm

October 23, 2002

With the passage of a trough and frontal system through southern Queensland, there was going to be the chance of storms through SE QLD.  The main problem was the shallow moisture depth.  However in the end we got a storm of a different kind – a duststorm!  I’d never experienced a duststorm before, and from my knowledge they’re extremely rare in Brisbane but this was testimony to how bad the drought was through much of the eastern half of Australia.

During the morning I loaded up the satellite image and got a shock at first!  I saw what I originally thought was low cloud over southern central Queensland!  It didn’t make sense, with DPs so low out there (negative in some areas!)  It soon clicked – dust!!!  And sure enough over the radio and the weather forum there was very soon talk about the dust storm moving across Queensland and NSW.  The dust had been picked up overnight and was being whipped up by strong SW’ly winds.  I was actually quite excited!  My first duststorm, but I wasn’t sure what to expect.

In the end, some weak storms ended up developing around Brisbane during the afternoon.  I took some video of a few of the cells – nothing fantastic but nice to see. 

Later that afternoon, the duststorm was approaching however Brisbane was going to cop it mostly at night (which was annoying because I wanted to see Brisbane covered in dust during the daytime!) 

In the end, I decided to go to an advantage point that looked west to see the dust coming across at sunset.  I went to Wellington Point and looked westwards over the bay. 

It was quite cool – a big band of dust was moving over!  Eventually the Sun went behind the dust – this was really eerie, we got plunged into darkness much earlier. 

I ended up driving home and waited for a bit.  Unfortunately, it was also quite hot today – and the seabreeze had been blowing a fair bit.  In our area, the seabreeze actually held the dust at bay for a couple of hours!  A friend of mine who lives just 20 minutes SW of me got the dust two hours before I did.  I was a little disappointed – I ended up going for a drive, it was cool seeing dust in the street lights but it didn’t come out very well on video unfortunately.

But still – it was a novelty event and a bit of fun!