East Asia dust storm
This Terra MODIS Dust RGB product shows a wall of postfrontal dust blowing across eastern China.
Dust outbreaks sweep through China
18 February 2016 00:00 UTC–19 February 23:30 UTC
During 18-19 February 2016 several dust outbreaks occurred over China.
Last Updated
10 October 2022
Published on
17 February 2016
By HansPeter Roesli (Switzerland)
Driven by westerly winds, the dust swept through the country, partially as far as the East China Sea.
The conditions over these two days were quite cloudy, so the dust is difficult to identify.
Only the sequence of half-hourly Dust RGBs in the very fast animation (Figure 2) reveals some of the dust sources and streamers.
Two Dust RGB images offer the opportunity to pinpoint a couple of the many dust sources.
The VIIRS overflight on 18 February close to 07:00UTC (Figure 3) shows sources labelled A and B on either side of the Qilian mountains.
On the image from Himawari-8 taken 31 hours later (Figure 4) new sources of dust (labelled 1 and 2) appeared further east on either side of the borderline between the provinces of Qinghai and Gansu.
It looks like the dust sources shown in Figure 3 had a relatively short outreach, while those shown in Figure 4 were farther reaching.
Additional content
Dust cloud from China expected to reach Taiwan today (Taipei Times)
