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| | | | | | | Satellites monitoring dust storms linked to health risk
10 May 2005
| A dust storm moving across Africa's western Sahel belt on 3 March 2004, as seen by MSG-1, now renamed Meteosat-8. The dust can be seen blowing offshore, even reaching the Canary Islands. Dust storms are being mapped as part of the ESA-led Epidemio project.
Credits: DLR | |  |  | |
| | | | | | View of a dust storm. Some two billion tonnes of dust are blown into the atmosphere each year, most of it coming from Africa's Sahara and arid Sahel region. | | | | |
| | | | | | Based on Meteosat-7's MVIRI instrument, this is a sample dust mapping product of the western Sahel zone for 3 March 2004, the same day as the dust storm depicted in the animation above. The product is based on the Infrared Derived Dust Index (IDDI), a 1º x 1º gridded dataset providing an indirect measure of the presence of atmospheric aerosols over the land areas of Africa and parts of the Middle East. The presence of a dust layer reduces the infrared radiance of satellite targets. Yellow shows the highest dust levels, descending down to orange, red, purple, dark blue and finally black for the lowest dust levels. The IDDI was developed at the Laboratoire d'Optique Atmosphérique (LOA) de Lille, at L'Université des Sciences et Technologies de Lille in France. | | | | |
| | | | | Desert dust blown from the Western Sahara towards the Canary Islands, seen in this 300-metre resolution Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) image, acquired 1 March 2003. The wind can move between 60 and 200 million tonnes of fine dust up from the Sahara each year.
Credits: ESA 2003 | | | | |
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