Dust plumes blew over Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Gulf of Oman on February 8, 2010. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this true-color image the same day. Pale beige dust plumes fan out over western Afghanistan, along the border with Iran. More plumes appear in the south, over southeastern Iran and western Pakistan. A thick plume of dust spreads over part of the Gulf of Oman. A line of tiny clouds fringes this plume’s southwestern margin. In the east, the plume appears truncated by a cloudbank.
The dual-natured Dasht-e Lut Desert in Iran appears clearly in this image, but none of the dust appears to be coming from there. Instead, dust appears to rise from areas known to hold dry salt lakes (Iran-Afghanistan border and southern Iran) and sand seas (southwestern Pakistan).
References & Resources
NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC. Caption by Michon Scott.
