Dust and clouds mingled over the Atlantic Ocean on July 2, 2009, spreading more than a thousand kilometers west of the African coast. The dust was likely a remnant of plumes that had blown off the African coast the previous day. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite took this natural-color picture on July 2. Thin but discernible dust plumes form a massive counter-clockwise arc west of Western Sahara and Mauritania. A pocket of thick dust appears to have collected southwest of Cape Verde, immediately south of a large cloud bank. The large version of this image has a resolution of 1 kilometer.

NASA image courtesy MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center. Caption by Michon Scott.

Instrument: 

Terra - MODIS