Three days of Saharan Dust
A large amount of Saharan Dust has been blowing off of the African continent for the past several days. The dust is moving to higher latitudes reaching as far north as southern Ireland. These strong dust events heavily affect air quality in the Canary Islands and a yellow alert is still in effect in the archipelago. The event is known locally in the Canaries as “La Calima.” The dust is predicted to continue moving toward northwest Europe.
Daytime true color images of the dust transport are shown for 1/16, 1/17, and 1/18 from 0900 UTC to 1800 UTC. These true-color images were taken from RealEarth, a free data visualization web tool.
The GOES-16 Dust RGB product shows plumes of dust (magenta) still coming off the coast of west Africa and thick clouds (orange) associated with plumes farther north.
