A dust plume blew off the coast of Libya at the end of May 2009. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite took this true-color picture on May 31, 2009, at 11:10 a.m. local time (9:10 UTC). Thanks to the uniform color of the land surface, source points for the storm are not easily discerned in this image, but the airborne dust likely arose from sediments near the coast. The plume blows toward the northwest, past the coastal city of Banghazi, fanning out slightly over the Mediterranean Sea.
The climate and landscape change abruptly in Libya, with coastal weather driven by the Mediterranean Sea, and inland weather driven by the Sahara Desert. The country is sparsely populated, but nearly 75 percent of the population squeezes into a narrow corridor of land along the coast—just 1.5 percent of the country’s total land area.
NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center. Caption by Michon Scott.
