We have a lot of dust.
A 2026 peer-reviewed Cyprus source-apportionment paper found that dust is a major part of PM10 here. At a rural monitoring station away from city traffic, the kind that measures the island's baseline air, dust accounted for 42% of PM10 mass. The authors call Cyprus the EU country most impacted by natural desert dust because it is affected by both Arabian desert dust and Saharan dust storms.
How dust reaches us: three typical days
About this figure
72 hourly snapshots from EUMETSAT's MSG weather satellite, one per hour from Monday to Wednesday last week. The native cadence is every 15 minutes; we sample every hour to keep the loop short.
Dust shows as magenta because this is the Dust RGB composite. Three infrared channels are combined so airborne mineral dust stands out clearly from brown land and dark sea or cloud. Infrared means it works day and night.
Imagery © EUMETSAT, free to use with attribution. Basemap from OpenStreetMap via OpenFreeMap. Country outlines from OSM and Natural Earth.
PM10Quick note before the charts. PM10 means airborne particles that are 10 micrometres across or smaller, roughly one-seventh the width of a human hair. It's the standard EU air-quality measure and it includes both fine fractions and coarser dust.
Most days the air looks clear. On the days it doesn't, the numbers are striking. A recent peer-reviewed study used nine years of measurements at a Nicosia traffic site and at a rural mountain station measuring the island's baseline air. Dust came out as the single biggest contributor to particulate matter at both. And it has been rising every year since 2015.
The graphs below use raw measurements. We are not subtracting natural dust the way regulators sometimes do for compliance accounting. The European Environment Agency itself reports PM10 without those subtractions, because what people breathe doesn't care where it came from.
What a bad dust morning looks like
Hourly PM10 readings across Cyprus at 07:00 on 3 April 2026, the morning Cyprus' labour inspectorate ordered outdoor work to be suspended. The dashed line is the EU daily limit of 50 μg/m³.
Days over the EU daily limit
The EU allows the daily PM10 limit of 50 μg/m³ to be exceeded on no more than 35 days per year. These are the raw exceedance counts at Cyprus' and Athens' reporting stations in 2024, before any subtraction of natural dust.
What Nicosia's air is made of
Source apportionment of PM10 at the Nicosia Traffic station, averaged over 2015–2023. Dust is the largest single contributor. Bigger than traffic, bigger than the smoke from wood and biomass burning.
- Dust 10.7 μg/m³
- Traffic 8.2 μg/m³
- Biomass burning 7.7 μg/m³
- Other sources
And it has been getting worse
Mineral dust at the Nicosia Traffic station has risen by roughly 0.79 μg/m³ every year since 2015. Traffic emissions, by comparison, have fallen by 35% over the same period. But dust keeps climbing.
Greece is in the same dust path
Athens and the other major Greek cities show the same pattern. Two peer-reviewed studies (a ten-year Athens dataset and a 2016–2022 multi-city survey) attribute a substantial share of urban PM10 to Saharan and other African desert dust, especially on the days that exceed the EU limit.
Sources: Aerosol and Air Quality Research, 2013 (Athens 2001–2010); Atmosphere, 2024 (six Greek cities, 2016–2022); Greek Ministry of Environment, May 2024 dust notice.
Where Cyprus and Greece sit in Europe
Cyprus has 2 PM10 reporting stations in the latest EU dataset; Greece has 20. Both Cyprus stations and all 20 Greek stations sit above the World Health Organization's annual guideline for PM10, and most are already above the stricter daily limit the EU adopts in 2030.
of Cyprus' PM10 stations are above the WHO air-quality guideline.
is above the EU's 2030 daily PM10 limit, four years before it takes effect.
of Greek PM10 stations are above the WHO annual PM10 guideline.
are already above the EU's 2030 daily PM10 limit.
How Cyprus and Greece stack up against the rest of the EU
The 2025 EEA dataset has 2,354 PM10 monitoring stations across the EU. Each bar below is one country: the bar length is the share of that country's stations whose annual PM10 mean sits above the WHO guideline of 15 μg/m³. Cyprus, Greece, and Malta are the only three EU members where every station exceeds the guideline.
A simple thing you can do on a dust day.
First Defense Nasal Screens are a small adhesive filter you wear on the outside of each nostril. Three sizes. Up to 24 hours of wear. €12 for a week's worth.
Buy nowSources
- Bimenyimana et al., 2026. Persistent high PM pollution in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East: insights from long-term observations and source apportionment in Cyprus. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. DOI: 10.5194/acp-26-1605-2026.
- Cyprus Department of Labour Inspection, Air Quality Service: 3 April 2026 dust episode and the 2024 Annual Technical Report (PDF). Main site: airquality.dli.mlsi.gov.cy.
- European Environment Agency, 2026. Air quality status in Europe 2026. Particulate matter PM₁₀.
- Mitsakou et al., 2013. Identification of the Influence of African Dust on PM10 Concentrations at the Athens Air Quality Monitoring Network during the Period 2001–2010. Aerosol and Air Quality Research, 13, 1492–1503.
- 2024 multi-city study. Air Quality Assessment in Six Major Greek Cities with an Emphasis on the Athens Metropolitan Region. Atmosphere, 15(9), 1074.
- Greek Ministry of Environment and Energy: 2024 Annual Air Quality Report (PDF) and May 2024 Saharan dust event notice.
This page presents publicly available environmental data for Cyprus. It is not medical advice. The product on this site is sold as a general consumer item under EU general product safety rules.