Each year, hundreds of millions of tons of sand particles are blown across the Atlantic Ocean and help build beaches in the Caribbean and fertilize soils in the Amazon
Update: The dust plume is moving over the Yucatan Peninsula and up through the Gulf of Mexico.
NASA-NOAA’s Suomi NPP satellite observed a huge Saharan dust plume streaming over the North Atlantic Ocean, beginning on June 13, 2020. Satellite data showed the dust had spread over 2,000 miles.
At NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, Colin Seftor, an atmospheric scientist, created an animation of the dust and aerosols from the plume using data from instruments that fly aboard the Suomi NPP satellite.
“The animation runs from June 13 to 18 and shows a massive Saharan dust cloud that formed from strong atmospheric updrafts that was then picked up by the prevailing westward winds and is now being blown across the Atlantic and, eventually over North and South America,”Seftor said. “The dust is being detected by the aerosol index measurements from the Suomi-NPP Suomi NPP satellite’ s Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS) data overlaid over visible imagery from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS).”
On June 18, 2020, the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA-NOAA’s Suomi NPP satellite captured a visible image of the large light brown plume of Saharan dust over the North Atlantic Ocean. The image showed that the dust from Africa’s west coast extended almost to the Lesser Antilles in the western North Atlantic Ocean. The image showed that the dust had spread over 2,000 miles across the Atlantic.
Each year, hundreds of millions of tons of dust are picked up from the deserts of Africa and blown across the Atlantic Ocean. That dust helps build beaches in the Caribbean and fertilizes soils in the Amazon.
It can also affect air quality in North and South America.
NASA continues to study the role of African dust in tropical cyclone formation. In 2013, one of the purposes of its HS3 field mission addressed the controversial role of the hot, dry and dusty Saharan Air Layer in tropical storm formation and intensification and the extent to which deep convection in the inner-core region of storms is a key driver of intensity change.
Source: NASA
(21.06.2020, USA: 06.21.2020)