What's that in the sky?
What appeared to be an unusual and unexpected storm turned out to be a cloud of dirt, dust, pollen, bugs and even birds.
National Weather Service forecasters in Dallas-Forth Worth Texas picked up the strange phenomenon on their radar on Friday while the weather remained hot and dry, reaching record highs of 105 and 106 degrees in the Austin area to the south.
'It looked like it was raining,' Jennifer Dunn, a meteorologist for the weather service office that covers the Dallas-Fort Worth region, told the
Austin American-Statesman.
'We thought something was wrong with the radar, but we checked our instruments and measurements. Everything was working fine.'
Dunn and her colleagues said their best guess was that the anomaly was a giant swarm of bugs.
But a meteorologist for the weather service office in New Braunfels, which includes Austin, told the
Statesman that insects likely made up less than 1 per cent of the unusual matter in the air over the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Comment: ...and then there were three or four off Nice in the South of France in early June, and another one recently in Louisiana.