A blanket of sand from the Sahara Desert is likely to cover Greece tomorrow and again on Monday, which is a public holiday, one of Greece’s top meteorologists told Kathimerini yesterday.

Dimitris Ziakopoulos, the director of the National Meteorological Service (EMY), said that low pressure over the Sahara coupled with southerly winds mean that the dust cloud will reappear over Greece but in a less dense form than last Friday, when it disrupted flights and caused breathing problems for asthma sufferers.

The weatherman said the Sahara sand cloud is not new, and was even referred to in Homer’s “Iliad.” Ziakopoulos said that the cloud consists of tons of grains of sand blown from the Sahara at a height of between 1,500 and 8,000 meters. The sand eventually falls to the ground or is deposited in the form of muddy rain.