• Credit:

  NASA image courtesy the MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center

A dust storm from the central Sahara Desert in northern Africa was making its way westward, out over Western Sahara (top) and Mauritania (bottom) and on to the Atlantic Ocean on January 6, 2005. Dust storms such as this can cross the Atlantic and come down in the southern United States, the Caribbean, and South America. This image of the storm was captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. The high-resolution image provided above is 500 meters per pixel. The MODIS Rapid Response System provides this image at additional resolutions.

Images & Animations

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• Database Updated: May 21, 2013