Middle East
A massive dust cloud hovered over the Middle East in mid-June 2008, stretching from Iraq to India and spreading south past the Arabian Peninsula. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this natural-color image on June 18, 2008. This image shows part of the storm, including some of the thickest dust, concentrated over the Arabian Sea. Besides the heavy band of dust south of Oman, the storm creates a faint dusty haze covering almost the entire region.
This stunning image of dust storms in the Middle East was made from images acquired from the MODIS instruments on both the Aqua and Terra satellites. The images were captured on February 22, 2008.
Streamers of dust blew out over the waters of the Red Sea (left), the Persian Gulf (top), and the Indian Ocean (bottom right). In particular, sheets of dust can seen blowing over the water from countries on the Arabian Peninsula, like Saudi Arabia (left center) Yemen (bottom left center) and Oman (center). Dust is also blowing off Iran (top center) and Pakistan (top right).