Rome, 30 April 2024 – Red rain over Italy: the Sahara dust could interest Italy again tomorrow May 1st. Here are the experts’ predictions and the explanation of its composition.
Red rain over Italy: the forecast
This curious atmospheric phenomenon is not so rare. Bernardo Gozzini of the Cnr, director of the Lamma environmental monitoring laboratory, clarifies: “The so-called red rain could affect Italy tomorrow, when the first real disturbance is expected. So in the rainfall of May 1st in some areas it could rain water mixed with sand. The result? Let’s say it can make cars dirty.”
For May 1st the instability will affect all of Italy, “starting from the Tyrrhenian regions, then from Piedmont it will extend to much of the North. But it will also concern the south, Calabria, Sicily, Sardinia. The Adriatic side will be less affected.”
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The sand from the Sahara arrives in Italy thanks to a “sack, like a low pressure center that is created over Spain. This low pressure center causes there to be a southerly wind with a pull of hot African air, the same one that has determined the temperatures of these days and which can also bring with it the desert sand.” If it does not rain, “the sand remains suspended in the atmosphere”.
But what is in the sand of the Sahara? “The most common mineral is quartz, therefore the silicon dioxide – he clarifies Andrea Dini, head of the Geochemistry and Mineralogy Laboratory of the Cnr -. What does it cause? The sand comes with the rain, so it is wet and difficult to inhale. It could become a problem in the case of large quantities, if there is an inch of sand on our territory which then dries out and is dispersed by the wind.”
But not just red rain. “Many come to us in Europe in addition to quartz granules, i.e. very thin flakes, of clay which are easily transported by the wind for hundreds of kilometers”.
But what are the effects on the ground? “In a region with limestones like the central Apennines – is the expert’s explanation – the deposit of cilicium dioxide can also be helpful for certain plants that like a slightly more acidic environment. But the quantities involved are so small that they cannot change the characteristics of the terrain. And then we live in an area full of quartz rocks, which is the most common mineral in the earth’s crust. Every day we are subject to breathing the dust produced by rocks. So I wouldn’t worry about Sahara sand. Unless you think of certain areas of Morocco, Algeria or Libya. If climate change causes recurring sandstorms that always blow in a certain direction and a city finds itself subject to these storms, of course something comes to mind, in which case a careful study should be done.” But the shape of the dust is also very important. “It really depends on how thin it is, especially if it is angular or rounded. In other words: the quartz dust that caused silicosis in miners was made up of ‘splinters’ of glass that stuck in the lungs like real swords. Instead, those that arrive with sand from the Sahara have a rounded shape, worked by the ven to”.
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