Arabian Sand Storm

Arabian Sand Storm

The thick wall of dust that blew across the Arabian Peninsula March 25–27, 2011, had thinned into an ethereal plume that extended across the Arabian Sea by the time the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this image on March 30. The long plume extends across hundreds of kilometers from the southern shores of Oman to the coast of Pakistan. Clouds of dust from the powerful storm still linger over the peninsula and the Gulf of Oman.

NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC. Caption by Holli Riebeek.