“Today’s weather will again affect the Saharan dust,” the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute wrote on its profile on the X platform. The Czechs should prepare again for the possibility of worsening breathing conditions on Sunday. In such cases, caution is recommended especially for the chronically ill, children and the elderly.
“The dust comes to us from the southwest originally and from the northwestern regions of the Sahara. This time, it is located in high and medium clouds, which are significantly more extensive and powerful than numerical models estimated,” explains the institute. According to him, the phenomenon that Europe has been dealing with several times in recent weeks can also affect (reduce) Sunday’s maximum temperatures.
According to experts, the cause of the increased frequency of Saharan dust over Europe is to be found in the transformation of natural processes. “Air circulation in the atmosphere is significantly affected by the temperature of the seas and oceans, which has recently been significantly above normal in the Mediterranean and Atlantic regions,” Petr Skalák, a meteorologist from the Institute of Global Change Research of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, explained the phenomenon during the last wave for Seznam Zprávy.
“Consequently, there is a change in the interaction between the ocean and the atmosphere and a modification of the atmospheric circulation, which causes incursions of warm subtropical air. The current one was additionally enriched with Saharan dust,” he added.
We have described the view of climate experts in detail here:
Small particles of sand from the Sahara are carried from the African continent to Europe by the flow of strong southerly winds.
“Sometimes there is a situation where cold air penetrates as far as North Africa. At its head – the cold front – the wind can reach high speeds, and thus has the ability to carry fine dust to high altitudes, from where it is subsequently carried by the southerly flow over Europe,” Miloslav Müller, a meteorologist from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, previously described for Seznam Správy and the Faculty of Science, Charles University.
According to Petr Skalák, sandstorms in the Sahara region happen almost on a daily basis. “But it doesn’t have to worry us Europeans, because in most cases the dust is carried outside Europe, e.g. over the Atlantic Ocean. There, among other things, it serves as a natural fertilizer for marine plankton,” he points out.
