You are browsing the archive for Sahara dust Archives - Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal.
17 October 2017
Weird, Wild Weather In Europe: Saharan Dust in Moscow and Portugal Smoke in Finland
Thanks to other NASA satellites and the NASA GEOS 5 model, you can see where the smoke is and where the Saharan dust is. Note that it originates from the fires in Portugal where the dust is from empty wastes of the Sahara. All of this was pulled northward as it was caught up in the circulation around Ophelia. Ophelia reached category 3 status and now holds the record for …
29 July 2016
Why The Tropical Atlantic is So Quiet
I used our new touch screen to show viewers why the Tropical Atlantic has been so quiet as we approach August. The answer is dust, and I showed some NASA satellite data that rarely gets shown on TV. Anchor Chris Weimer held my iPhone beside the camera while I did it. I then headed over to the green chroma-key wall to do the weekend forecast for the Eastern Shore of …
6 July 2015
Smoke North and Saharan Dust South
Several NASA satellites have sensors that can look at different wavelengths in the visible to infrared to sense things like dust and smoke. The image below is made up of two wavelengths around 500-550 nanometers in the visible light spectrum. Dust and smoke show up very well in this range. The red to the south is dust from the Sahara desert and the red across Canada and and the dark …
Dan Satterfield has worked as an on air meteorologist for 32 years in Oklahoma, Florida and Alabama. Forecasting weather is Dan's job, but all of Earth Science is his passion. This journal is where Dan writes about things he has too little time for on air. Dan blogs about peer-reviewed Earth science for Junior High level audiences and up.