The Eastern Province often gets shamals at this time of year. Winds blow sand from the mountains of Iran across the top of the Arabian Gulf and down the eastern side of the Arabian peninsula. The sand is uniquely reddish in color. The sand clouds can extend hundreds of meters above the ground and can reduce visibility to mere inches. Shamals typically last for a couple of hours. Planes are grounded. Traffic is halted, usually by multi-car and -truck pileups more than common sense.
But we have not yet had a true shamal. Instead we have had crazy, strong wind storms that bring in some moisture but mostly very fine tan clay that sticks to everything. This is a picture that I took from my office window of this kind of storm. From my office I can sometimes see the Arabian Gulf about 10 km to the east. On this day I couldn't even see to the other side of the parking lot.
The wind in these storms comes from the west, not the north. It is almost impossible to stay outside in these storms. Your eyes, nose, mouth, and ears quickly fill with fine grit. It is painful to blink and probably not very healthy to breathe.
A couple of weekends ago, I woke up to a deep orange, glowing sky. There was not a breath of wind blowing and camp was blanketed in this orange fog. This picture was taken looking from the back of my building towards the golf course.
A few minutes in this stuff and you find yourself blinking and swallowing grit, apparently a common thread in the weather here. The orange was the typical shamal color but the very fine suspended grains were unusually small for a shamal. And the absence of wind made it all quite eerie. The clay fog lasted for about six hours before finally blowing away.
We continue to get rain every few days. Large rain systems don't form here--perhaps the temperature distribution or the currents in the atmosphere makes it hard for big cloud systems to build up. When it does rain, the rain fall pattern is extremely patchy. For example, it often does not rain all over camp at the same time. This is a picture I took last winter but it is an amazing shot: rain dripping off the roof onto my porch.
The rain storms are a welcome break between the clay storms and clay fogs. If there is enough rain, it washes the dust and salt off the plants. Here is a nice shot of a pink and a white oleander taken the morning after a particularly heavy rain. The blooms are a bit past their prime but the leaves are clean and green.
I think the spring of odd weather is drawing to a close. It was 104 F yesterday and only expected to get hotter.
1 comment:
Oh I remember those. We used to get lots of those in Bagdad, they usually lasted for a day or so.
We didn't get them as much in Syria though. But I remember the grit and in your hair and the layer on your skin you had to scrub off. The water in the shower usually took on new colors. My mom didn't want my dad or I ever to take baths during storms as it was a bitc# to wash the tub.
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