On April 17, 2007, desert winds whipped up a severe dust storm over Cairo, according to the Associated Press. Poor visibility shut down Cairo’s airport for several hours. At 09:05 UTC the same day, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this image of dust blowing northward along the Nile and fanning out over the Mediterranean Sea.
In this image, dust partially obscures the view of the Nile well inland from the coastline. The dust grows especially thick near the coast, just west of the Nile Delta. A fine gray outline shows the coastal contour through the dust. Just southeast of the storm is a bank of clouds, potentially associated with the same weather system that kicked up the dust around Cairo.
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NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center.
