If you're checking the weather forecast for Britain over the next week or so you may be a little surprised by what you see. If you spot that ‘blood rain' is predicted for Halloween you'd be excused in thinking that someone was playing a prank.
However, experts are indeed forecasting that parts of the UK will experience a reddish coloured rain known as ‘blood rain'. Don't worry though, rather than it signalling the end of the world, it is simply a natural phenomena caused when rain picks up sand from deserts.
As a Met Office spokesman explains: "It is a rather grandiose term for fine desert sand particles that are whipped up by winds and mix with the moisture in clouds". Winds then carry the clouds over great distances, before the moisture is deposited from them as red or brown rain (though unfortunately not quite as bright red as the picture above).
In this case, we have the Sahara desert to thank, where storms have mixed huge amounts of sand with the clouds. Particularly strong winds are now in the process of blowing those clouds over towards the UK. However, before they reach us, these warm desert winds are expected to raise temperatures in Britain to as high as 20C (68F) over the next few days.
