As much of Queensland’s Outback areas experience extreme dry conditions, the likelihood of grey nomads and other travellers running into a dust storm is increasing dramatically.
DustWatch, a community-based program which monitors wind erosion across Australia, says conditions are ripe for a highly active dust season.
It says there have been 15 localised dust events recorded at Birdsville in far south-west Queensland in the past month alone, with more likely to be on the way.
“The wind systems are still moving across that part of the country and historically there are events or accounts of very big dust storms even coming through in December,” Griffith University’s Dr Craig Strong told the ABC. “The rainfall outlook is not all that good and the vegetation is dying off quite rapidly.”
He says sediment that has been deposited by flooding in Lake Eyre in recent years is also starting to break down and the drought has meant the landscape is bare.
“Once you get these big fronts moving across these freshly available dust sources – whether it is through the lake systems or the Simpson Desert where there has been fire scars, or in the rangelands where the vegetation has just been dying out very quickly – we start to have the capacity for these very big dust storms to pick up large areas of sediment,” he said.
Birdsville resident Lyn Rowlands told the ABC that while it has been a nuisance, the storms have been nothing like the 1950s and 1960s.
“I know the evaporative air-conditioning – it pressurises your house and it stops a lot of the dust from coming in,” she said.
She said only rain will ease the dusty outlook.
Have you ever been caught in a dust storm? Have you noticed a big change in the landscape compared to other ‘wetter’ years? Is your rig duct-proof? Comment below.
