COLUMBUS, Ohio — Many central Ohio residents woke up Saturday morning to find their vehicles covered in what appeared to be a layer of dust or dirt after rain moved through the area on Friday.

Several viewers contacted 10TV and asked why the rain had a weird color as it was coming down around the region.

While some might have thought it was pollen or just waiting too long for a car wash, meteorologists say it came from dust on the other side of the country. The dust traveled hundreds of miles in the sky before finally falling not just in Ohio but also in numerous locations east of the Mississippi River.

Here's why.

What appeared as "dirty rain" was actually dust from a large dust storm out of Texas and New Mexico that was sucked up into the atmosphere and fell with the rain. The storm that generated this dust came with wind gusts that reached 62 miles per hour at times. The National Weather Service said visibility was as low as a quarter mile.

This was just one of several rounds of dust picked up by strong winds across the southwest over the last week, resulting in pictures like the one below from El Paso.

All of this dust has to go somewhere once it gets up into the atmosphere, and that somewhere happened to be across the country until it finally got picked up by some rain. This had a widespread impact, with reports of dust rain happening across Ohio, as well as Missouri, Illinois and West Virginia.

To give some perspective, the two satellite images below show just how far this dust actually traveled.

The saying goes, what goes up must come down, and that result was our "dirty rain" to end the work week.

This is not something new or uncommon; in fact, the rain is always bringing back down particulate matter that has been lofted into the air. It's part of the reason for environmental regulation and standards, as anything we put into the air will eventually come back down and impact our soils and water supplies.

The rain acts as a filter for the air, washing out anything that is able to be dissolved into water and on days like Friday, those dissolved particles just happened to be large enough to be easily visible.

The good news is there isn't anything especially harmful with this rainfall, and all you need to do now is to seek out another car wash, as this week Mother Nature let us down with the cleaning schedule!

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