Clouds of dust from deserts in northern Africa continued to spill westward out over the Atlantic Ocean on February 16, 2005. In the lower right corner of the image, dust is especially thick over Nigeria. The veil of dust stretches across the lower half of the image and spreads westward to the edge of the image. In fact, the plume of dust extends hundreds of kilometers farther over the Atlantic than what is pictured here. In the center portion of the image, dust may be mingling with smoke from numerous agricultural fires (marked in red dots).
This image is a mosaic of imagery collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite during three consecutive overpasses of the satellite. The right hand portion was collected first, the middle portion about 90 minutes later, and the left hand portion about 90 minutes after that. The high-resolution image provided above is 4 kilometers per pixel. The MODIS Rapid Response System provides this image at additional resolutions.
NASA image courtesy MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center
