As ex-Hurricane Ophelia battered Ireland and the UK, it also turned the sky a strange colour.

Thick sand, dust and smoke in the atmosphere turned the sky an ominous shade of yellow and transformed the sun into a deep orange colour.

People described the midday sky as looking more like sunset and reported street lights coming on automatically in the middle of the day.

Some of the sand and dust had been transported thousands of kilometres from Africa's Sahara Desert.

Carried on the winds of Ophelia, the dust was high in the atmosphere, so at street-level, the air was clear and safe to breathe.

The air also contained a significant amount of smoke from deadly wildfires in Spain and Portugal.

The flames had been fanned by the storm, becoming treacherous over the past few days.

As Ophelia moves across Scandinavia, a trailing leg of cloud and rain will bring useful wet weather to the Iberian Peninsula. This will hopefully help to dampen the flames over the next few days.