A dust plume blew from the Sahara across the Mediterranean Sea toward Europe in early November 2008. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image of the plume on November 1, 2008. This image shows the faint gray-beige plume blowing toward the northeast, skirting southern Italy and mixing with clouds over Greece. Although the origin of the dust plume is not obvious in this image, the dust may have arisen from sand seas in Algeria, namely Grand Erg Oriental near the Algeria-Libya border and, to the west, Grand Erg Occidental.
NASA image courtesy MODIS Rapid Response, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Caption by Michon Scott.
