Central Sudan’s skies remained filled with dust on May 9, 2009, and the massive dust plume overhead stretched into the Central African Republic. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image the same day.
The dust cloud’s southern margin is fairly distinct. Despite tendrils of dust blowing toward the southeast, deep green land cover peers out from under the plume’s southern margin. In the north, the dust plume’s extent is harder to discern, thanks to an arid landscape showing the same range of earth tones as the dust.
As Sudan possesses no substantial sand seas, this dust may have originated off the country’s northern border, in the massive sand deposits of the Sahara.
NASA image courtesy MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center. Caption by Michon Scott.
