Dust briefly clouded the skies over Sicily in early December 2022, yet the Italian island’s iconic volcano still managed to put on a show.
Dust briefly clouded the skies over Sicily in early December 2022, yet the Italian island’s iconic volcano still managed to put on a show.
On December 7, 2022, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite acquired this natural-color image of dust blowing over the Mediterranean Sea and southern Italy. The dust originated in the Sahara Desert, carried by southerly winds known as the scirocco. (In North Africa, these same desert winds are known as “chrom” (hot) or “arifi” (thirsty)). The warm, dry air mass picks up moisture over the Mediterranean as it moves north toward areas of lower pressure. The systems usually produce fog or light rain, which can combine with the dust and fall as mud.
The scirocco on December 7 failed to deliver any rain to Sicily, and skies that day stayed quite dusty, according to Boris Behncke, a volcanologist at the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia. The thick haze obscured Behncke’s ground-based view of Mount Etna, 20 kilometers (12 miles) away. However, a close look at the satellite image reveals a snowcapped peak surrounded by a “halo” of clear air. Behncke thinks this suggests that the dust was relatively low in altitude.
Read more at: NASA Earth Observatory
Photo Credit: NASA Earth Observatory
