"It's unusual for dust events to happen on the coast because we're so much further away from that dust over the western NSW basin and we've got the Great Dividing Range in the way," she said. 'The strong winds associated with this dry soil, with a lack of vegetation, are the perfect conditions to pick up the dust, lift it up into the atmosphere and bring it east with the winds,' Bureau of Meteorology forecaster Anita Pyne said. However, if conditions were to worsen there is potential for flight delays. A similar weather event hit back in 2009, as a dust storm blanketed the city in an orange glow and caused the state government to lift its air quality warning to “hazardous.”

Australia is the driest inhabited continent on the planet and farmers in parts of the country have been struggling amid severe drought conditions for much of the year.–Bloomberg "We really have to wait and see," Ms Pyne said. Olivia Probyn, the manager of the White Cliffs Hotel, in the remote town of White Cliffs in northwest NSW, said one moment the tiny outback community was going about its day, and five minutes later it was cloaked in an eerie blanket of red dust - obscuring everything in sight. “Everything was covered in dust and it was getting in through the cracks in the building because it’s quite an old pub, the tiling was covered in thick mud so there was a big clean-up.”

Ms Probyn uploaded dramatic footage of the storm onto Facebook and within hours it had racked up thousands of views from users who left comments expressing shock and gratitude they weren’t caught in the wild storm. Mr Adam Morgan of the Bureau of Meteorology said a low pressure system over South Australia and Victoria states had pushed strong winds across areas of western New South Wales that have experienced one of the worst drought seasons in years.
A 500-kilometre-wide (310 mi) dust storm, that engulfed parts of Australia’s outback, reaches Sydney.