Much to the surprise of Sydney-siders, a dusty haze settled over the city on Tuesday morning after a week of heavy rain.

Satellite images reveal the dust storm formed in the Mid-North region of South Australia, east of Spencer Gulf, at around 11am on Monday. It then travelled through western Victoria into New South Wales, reaching Sydney approximately 18 hours later.

It’s an odd time of year for a dust storm, but South Australia is in drought. The soil is very dry, bare and loose. So when a cold front with strong winds moved through SA earlier this week, it picked up lots of dust.

This demonstrates how everything is interconnected in Australia, despite the nation’s huge size. Extreme weather events such as drought in one part of the country can cause trouble for people “downwind”, hundreds of kilometres away. Climate change is likely to further raise the risk of dust storms in the future.

In the 1930s, prolonged drought in the United States coupled with poor land management practices caused devastating dust storms. This eroded valuable agricultural soils and forced many families off the land. All this took place across the Central Plains, which became known as the American Dust Bowl – later immortalised in Steinbeck’s book The Grapes of Wrath.

Australia experienced its own smaller dust bowl about a century after British settlers arrived. Overgrazing in the late 1800s removed native vegetation from large parts of western New South Wales. Dust storm activity picked up dramatically from the late 1800s onwards and

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