NASA satellites have spotted an enormous brown plume of dust from the Sahara desert reaching out across the Atlantic Ocean.
The vast dust cloud, spotted on June 18 was spotted by NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory and the NASA-NOAA satellite Suomi NPP. Views from Suomi NPP, which NASA shared here, show the dust plume spreading out over 2,000 mile of the North Atlantic Ocean.
A global view of the dust storm from DSCOVR’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) shows the sheer scale of the plume in relation to the continents which border the Atlantic, according to NASA’s Earth Observatory site.
Also on June 18, NASA’s Terra satellite was able to get a detailed look at the dust over the Cape Verde islands off Africa’s west coast using the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument.
This moving plume was no surprise as earlier in the week, on June 16, NOAA’s GOES-East satellite captured stunning imagery of the plume traveling from the Sahara Desert west across the Atlantic.
The traveling dust was also expected because, according to NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division, every three to five days from late spring through early fall, such a dust cloud, known as the…