Dust Storms in the Sahara Desert

I love the different perspective that NASA pictures from space give me. Dustorms fascinate me. At least looking at them does. I really don’t like being caught out in them. I remember we had a whole series of them in The Gambia years ago which were so bad I could not see across the street, and there we were on the edge of the Atlantic ocean.

One of the best places to look for these photos is the NASA category Dust & Smoke

On February 21, 2007, a dust storm several hundred kilometers across clogged the skies over Algeria and Mali. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite took this picture the same day. ThisNASA  image shows the dust cloud over the Sahara Desert. As the dust is only slightly lighter than the sand below, the storm is easiest to discern in the east, over more variegated terrain.

More

Sahara Dust Storm

[Source: NASA]

west africa NASA

Dust and clouds mingled over the Atlantic Ocean on July 2, 2009, spreading more than a thousand kilometers west of the African coast. The dust was likely a remnant of plumes that had blown off the African coast the previous day. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite took this natural-color picture on July 2. Thin but discernible dust plumes form a massive counter-clockwise arc west of Western Sahara and Mauritania. A pocket of thick dust appears to have collected southwest of Cape Verde, immediately south of a large cloud bank. More

[Source: NASA]