Blowing dust over the Sahara Desert
January normally isn’t the time of year for large-scale blowing dust events over the Sahara Desert region of northern Africa, but Meteosat-8 false color imagery (above; Java animation) did show a small plume of blowing dust in northern Chad on 18 January 2007. These images utilize Meteosat channels 1, 2, and 3 as the red, green, and blue (RGB) image components to create a false color representation. In these particular images, the plume of blowing dust (light gray color) could be seen moving southwestward across the center of the viewing area; patches of middle to upper level cloudiness farther to the north were moving eastward across the Sahara desert region. There were no surface reports in the immediate vicinity of the apparent dust plumes, but N´Djamena airport (station identifier FTTJ) located just to the south (in southern Chad) did report haze (H) at 14:00 UTC that day (below).
