Weather News

Dust settles on western NSW

Western New South Wales is shrouded in dust this morning and more storms are expected today as winds reach gale force.

Winds of up to 100 kilometres an hour were reported at White Cliffs and Tibooburra yesterday.

Daniel Hayes from the weather bureau at Cobar says with little rain in the past few months, the winds have whipped up dust across the region.

"In our western districts out here we've seen visibility overnight down to just a few hundred metres in most of our centres that are reporting visibility and we've seen wind gusts up to 90 or 95 kilometres an hour in quite a few of our centres," he said.

Mr Hayes says the dust storms were widespread and there are more to come today.

"We saw dust extending with those winds from yesterday afternoon in the far west of the state and it has reached through to the coast by now, there are reports of dust in Sydney as well so pretty much everybody's experiencing it," he said.

Chris Elliot from Wilcannia says it is the worst dust storm she has experienced.

"Well, it's worse than the dust storms of 2002 and I thought they were the worst since the early '60s in Hay, I thought 2002 was bad but yesterday was worse," she said.

At Dubbo airport, Regional Express flights are delayed by four hours because of storms last night in Sydney.

Qantas is flying to schedule.

The wild weather also dropped eight millimetres of rain on Coonabarabran, six at Baradine, five at Trangie and Dubbo and about three millimetres at Walgett and Mudgee.

- ABC

© ABC 2009

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