22 March 2012
Fig. 1
Dust storm over the southern Arabian Peninsula
Credit: NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC
On 4 March 2012, the thick dust that had hovered over Saudi Arabia a day earlier drifted southward off the shores of the Arabian Peninsula. NASA’s Terra satellite acquired a natural-color image (Fig. 1), showing a huge cloud of dust over Yemen, and translucent swirls of dust over the Arabian Sea.
Lines of small clouds are located on the margins of the dust plumes south of Oman. These clouds may have arisen from the same weather front that blew high winds and triggered the dust storm. This region is one of the world’s most prolific dust-producing areas, due in part to the presence of the Empty Quarter, a huge sand sea. The Empty Quarter contains about half as much sand as the Sahara Desert.
References
NASA Earth Observatory
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=77316
Aymen Mohamed Ibrahem
Senior Astronomy Specialist