Barmy Weather in Tenerife

It was quite difficult to capture the feeling on camera really, but the photo above shows not mist nor cloud, which is far more frequent over these mountains, but haze from the Saharan dust or sand in suspension in the air, otherwise known as a calima and one of the most dense I've ever seen.

The south of Britain is basking in what The Times called balmy weather - 13.2C (55.8F) in London - beating the record for the warmest night in January.

The cause, "At this time of year the Sun is far too weak over Britain to raise temperatures this high. Instead, the source is warm air swept up from the Canary Islands on an anticyclone. " You're welcome to our anticyclone!

Yesterday, here everyone was gasping in temperatures akin to those we normally get in summer, coming as such a sudden and brisk change from "two woolly" weather the day before. And when the human body has become used to the constant "benign, spring-like" weather that Tenerife is supposed to have year round, then it just isn't equipped to cope with such sudden changes.

Meanwhile, an alert was declared at the weekend in the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, on the expectation of high winds of up to 100 kmph. 120 kmph winds caused damage on the island of El Hierro, where schools have been closed as a precaution and the island corporation are asking people to stay indoors.

Un vistazo a Santa Cruz de Tenerife blog currently have a satelite image of the calima, which will show you the plumes of dust coming off Africa.

Yet here on the north of the Tenerife, while there was apparently no air movement at all, even with windows open on one side of the house, on the other there was quite a noise of dry leaves dancing around in a circle on the patio.

Now, I don't want to be the harbinger of bad ~~sh..~~ stuff, but the facts appear thus: that calimas provoke storms, which provoke calimas, which ... adnauseum.

And Santa Cruz Carnaval starts proper next week. And it always rains at some time when Santa Cruz Carnaval is on. Just so you know. :)

More Tenerife calima images