Dust plumes hovered over Turkey in late June 2009. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this true-color image on June 27, 2009. Dust plumes almost reach the Black Sea, and a faint haze of dust also appears in neighboring Iran.
Although prone to hot, dry summers, Turkey contains no vast sand seas similar to those of the Arabian Peninsula. Although source points for the dust storm are not obvious in this image, the dust may have blown northward from Saudi Arabia, and gathered additional material from the Tigris and Euphrates floodplains in Iraq and Syria.
NASA image courtesy MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center. Caption by Michon Scott.
