DustWatch is funded by the Lower Murray Darling, Lachlan, and Murray CMAs, the Department of Environment, Climate Change and WaterNSW and Griffith University.

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DustWatch report for week ending 19 October 2009

Hello and welcome to this week’s report.

We had a short break from dust in the week 28 September to 5 October, recording no exceedances at any station. However, last week we recorded three large dust storms between the early morning of Monday 12October and the late afternoon of Wednesday 14 October. These events were driven by very strong westerly winds that eased off late Monday afternoon but picked back up later that night and again on Tuesday morning. Some stations recorded wind speeds in excess of 60 km/h.

The MODIS image series (Figure 3 to 5) shows the source areas in the Simpson Desert/ Lake Eyre area and south-western Queensland emitting dust for the first event on Monday 12 October (Figure 3). The second image (Figure 4) shows the first event leaving the NSW coast on Tuesday. It also shows the source areas of the second event had shifted to north-western NSW. The third image (Figure5) shows the dust plume of the third event leaving the Queensland and NSW coast on Wednesday. The magnitude of the events were around 10 percent of the large “big red” event from three weeks ago that engulfed most of the east Australian coast.

The corresponding synoptic chart for Tuesday 13 October (Figure 1) shows the first cold front leaving the NSW coast with the second front approaching Australia from the west.

Figure 1. Synoptic chart for Tuesday 13 October

Figure 2. Last week’s rainfall with some minor falls across the eastern and southern part of the State.

DustWatch is funded by the Lower Murray Darling, Lachlan, and Murray CMAs, the Department of Environment, Climate Change and WaterNSW and Griffith University.

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Figure 3. Source areas emitting dust on Monday 12/10/09.

Figure 4. Dust leaving the NSW coast on Tuesday 13/10/09.

DustWatch is funded by the Lower Murray Darling, Lachlan, and Murray CMAs, the Department of Environment, Climate Change and WaterNSW and Griffith University.

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Figure 5. Dust leaving the NSW coast on Wednesday 14/10/09.

Figure 6. Hours of dust recorded last week at each DustWatch station

A total of 318 fires were detected between Monday 12 October and Monday 19 October (Figure 5).

The DustWatch TeamJohn Leys, Stephan Heidenreich and Mike Case

Acknowledgements: The MODIS image is courtesy of MODIS Rapid Response Project at NASA/GSFC, the fire data is courtesy of the Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) and the rainfall map of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. This project would not be possible without the assistance of all the DustWatchers who provide observations and help with maintenance of the instruments at the DustWatch stations. We gratefully acknowledge their contribution.