A plume of haze descended over Mumbai, India, on December 2, 2006. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) flying onboard NASA’s Aqua satellite took this picture the same day. In this image, the haze appears as a translucent band, slightly darker than the wispy clouds to the northwest. Underneath the haze, a greenish plume of sediment appears in the ocean off the coast of India.
Although the origin of the plume was not clear from adjacent satellite imagery, it could have originated in India itself. Aerosols—minute particles suspended in the atmosphere—can sometimes move in a gyre around India, following the path of the Ganges toward the Bay of Bengal, circling around the southern tip of the subcontinent, then re-approaching the country from the Arabian Sea.
NASA image created by Jesse Allen, Earth Observatory, using data provided courtesy of the Level 1 and Atmospheric Archive Distribution System.
