April showers bring ‘dirty rain’ to New England after storm absorbs desert dust 2,000 miles away

CONCORD, N.H. — No, New England, that wasn’t a new strain of spring pollen coating your cars. It was dust carried across the country in a phenomenon known as “dirty rain.”

April showers are supposed to bring May flowers, but the light rain that fell across the region last Friday and Saturday brought dirt instead. Christian Bridges, a meteorologist with WGME-TV in Portland, Maine, was as perplexed as anyone until he checked the satellite imagery.

“You could see that dust got picked up in New Mexico two days before on Thursday by the same storm system,” he said. “It then brought it up into the far northern part of the U.S. and then eventually brought it all the way to New England.”

Strong wind brought the dust to an altitude of around 10,000 feet (3,000 meters), he said, below the level of rain clouds.

“So the rain kind of grabbed the dust as it was falling and brought it down to the ground,” Bridges said. “It’s kind of cool to think it was transported 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) across the country.”

Parts of Wisconsin, Michigan and the northern Great Lakes region also reported “dirty rain” or “mud rain” before it hit Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Bridges said such rain is unusual but not unprecedented and is similar to the way smoke from Western wildfires makes it way east.