The day it snowed orange

On a cold March day in 2018, people across parts of Russia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and Romania stepped outside expecting the usual winter gray. But what they saw made them stop in their tracks.

The snow was orange.

Not dingy or dirty, not that weird slush that piles up after a week of traffic, this was vivid orange, like a creamsicle exploded across the countryside. Entire ski slopes turned shades of rust and peach. One snowboarder in Sochi called it “skiing on Mars.” Others said it looked like someone had photo-filtered the world.

But it wasn’t a glitch. It was science in action, and it all started 2,000 miles away in the heart of the Sahara Desert.

A powerful windstorm had kicked up massive amounts of Saharan dust, fine, red-orange particles that normally settle back into the desert. But this time, the atmosphere had other plans. Strong updrafts launched the dust high into the sky, where it got picked up by upper-level winds and carried north, sweeping across the Mediterranean.

When that warm, dust-filled air collided with a colder system over Eastern Europe, something wild happened. The dust particles acted as nuclei, tiny cores that snowflakes form around. As the snow began to fall, it carried the Sahara with it.

The result: orange snowflakes. Millions of them. And just like that, a normal late-winter storm became one of the most surreal weather events of the year.

It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened and it won’t be the last. Colored snow is more common than most people think. The world has seen pink snow (thanks to algae), yellow snow (hello, pollen), and even black snow caused by ash from wildfires. But there’s something extra haunting about orange snow. It looks alien. Unnatural. Like a warning from nature that the world is bigger and more interconnected, than we think.

Scientists call these long-distance weather events “aerosol transport,” and they’re more than just a cool headline. Dust like this can affect everything from cloud formation to air quality, and even carries microbes and pollutants across continents. What starts in the Sahara doesn’t stay in the Sahara — it ends up on mountaintops, city streets, and in people’s lungs thousands of miles away.

So when you hear someone say weather is “local,” just remind them of the time it snowed orange because a desert half a world away decided to share its dust.

It may have melted by morning, but the images of orange-tinted peaks, dusty streets, and skiers carving lines through creamsicle-colored drifts became instant weather lore, a perfect storm of science, surprise, and spectacle.

And around here, that’s what we call Weather Nerdy gold.