photo #5907124

In late January, strong easterly winds swept a large plume of dust from the Sahara Desert west across the Atlantic Ocean toward the Cape Verde archipelago 340 miles (550 km) off the coast of Africa. Southerly winds then redirected the plume north towards Europe with some of the dust eventually falling to the ground as far north as the United Kingdom. This image from instruments aboard NASA’s Terra satellite shows the plume engulfing the Cape Verde islands, where it caused haze and low visibility. It also shows how the steep volcanic islands disrupted the flow of the dust-carrying winds to shape the marine Stratocumulus clouds into alternating eddies known as von Kármán vortex streets. Extending westward from the islands, these swirling vortices of low cloud would have been so large that, even without the low visibility from the Saharan dust, their huge swirling forms could only be spotted from way above like this.