The Sandy Rainstorm (Updated!)

 To my students who I now know are reading this: stop reading this and go read Lord of the Rings. Or watch the movies. Or listen to the audiobooks. Or finish your homework. 

I had the remarkably pleasant experience of growing up in the Pacific Northwest, where the weather was notoriously mild. Sure, there's plenty of drippy days, but for the most part, it's not too hot and rarely too cold. Wisconsin got frigid each winter, and that year that Frozen came out it got colder than the North Pole on one day, but the nice trees and the fact that I spent most of my time indoors on the college campus anyway meant that it was far more bearable. 

Shenyang, as I've mentioned previously, is a little different. 

Even after three years here, the weather rarely ceases to catch me unawares, but today may have been the wildest I can remember. When I woke up this morning, I remember thinking that all the clouds certainly looked very dark, especially for after 6AM. I assumed it was rain, but just to be safe, I grabbed my pollution mask anyway.

At about 9AM, I looked out the window and saw that the sky looked yellow. Yellow sky. My students immediately joked that the aliens were landing. Then I noticed that rain was hitting the windows! The sky was completely covered with clouds, of course, but I was watching it wondering what in the world was in those clouds. 

From 9 to about 11:30, the sky went from yellow to orange. I did the best I could to capture the color, but my cell phone didn't really get the bizarre color. It wasn't just the sky either, by the way - orange light was filtering down into the classroom. The light coming in through my windows was orange. Everything looked tinted orange. 

Finally at about 11:30, it went back to yellow, and then back to a normal gray shade. I was still a bit baffled, and I asked a few of my friends what on earth that was, and they all told me the same thing: Sandstorm and raining at the same time. Some of them speculated that a little bit of pollution was in the air, too. 

The pictures below kind of show how weird it was, but my iPhone can't capture color at all. 

This was at about 9, when the sky was yellow. Not gray, yellow. 

This is a bit better, but it was fully orange. 

If you look in the shadow of my reflection, you can kind of see how intense the orange was. It was unreal for me!

That is just not something that I've ever seen before. Oh, I've seen sandstorms before, but I haven't seen one where the sky went Blogger orange before! 

Update, 3/23:

According to the Associated Press, it was the worst sandstorm in 10 years, and it got south to Beijing. It began in the Gobi Desert (that explains the color, I guess) and some schools there closed. It looks like we got off light!

I think we have another sandstorm today too, by the way. It's not nearly as bad, however - just an off-yellow in the sky.