May 16, 2011
A dust plume hundreds of kilometers long blew off the coast of western Africa and over the Atlantic in mid-May 2011. The plume blew toward the south-southwest, past the Cape Verde archipelago.
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this natural-color image on May 16, 2011. Most of the dust appears to blow off the coast around Western Sahara. Source points for the plume are not apparent in this image, but the dust may have arisen from sand seas covering most of Mauritania.
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NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC. Caption by Michon Scott.
