Where did all the dust go?... Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama

It seems like yesterday's big dust storm that originated in Nebraska and Colorado (see my previous post) has now traveled a huge distance.  The affected states include Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

I would risk to say (with no evidence at this moment except by a common sense guess) that the storm came into Texas during the afternoon of the 18 of Oct. 2012. And traveled through Louisiana today early in the morning, and, this picture is captured a little before noon local time. The image shown here is produced by our "beta" Near-Real-Time (NRT) dust aerosol detection system. And is produced using NASA Terra-MODIS multispectral data.

As the dust is traveling through central and south-eastern US, it seems to be weaker and weaker. I would forecast that the dust would end up near the East coast of the US, but very weak.

I promise a complete followup on Sunday night.


--------------------UPDATE------------------
I was right! It moved to the East coast. Check the following video...

Meanwhile in Central US... Big Time Dust Storms!

Today our system shows high probabilities of dust aerosols present in the states of Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma.  It seems like a strong winds originated from the Dakotas to Oklahoma and possibly cold fronts provoked a dust storm of a large size. The area monitored by NASA-Terra-MODIS suggests that the dust storm size could cover the state of Oklahoma almost in its entirety. 

A report from Tulsa, OK, says that the visibility in one of their highways was of about 10 feet, near black out. 

"A massive dust storm swirling reddish-brown clouds over northern Oklahoma triggered a multi-vehicle accident along a major interstate Thursday, forcing police to shut down the heavily traveled roadway amid near blackout conditions. (Oct. 18)" - Associated Press. Here is a video from a helicopter (I guess).

Another official source says the following:

"Strong winds in the Plains today have caused travel disruptions from the Dakotas to Oklahoma. This picture shows several trucks blown over on Interstate 90 near Belvidere, SD. This is just one of several reports of traffic accidents in the region caused by strong winds and/or blowing dust." - U.S. National Weather Service.

Our Near-Real-Time (NRT) Dust Aerosol Detection System (DADS) for the date can be accessed here: NRT DADS. In this site you can download the data granules corresponding to this dust storm, which are 16:55 (UTC) and 18:35 (UTC), both corresponding to multispectral data processed from the NASA Terra-MODIS instrument.

More information (local news) for Oklahoma can be found here and here.
Also for other reports about Kansas can be found here.


From our NRT-DADS system we produced the following images:

On the left is the true color image of the dust storm. On the right the detected probability of dust aerosols. The darker the less probable, the lighter the more probable.

This is the full-size image granule from MODIS 16:55 UTC.

This is the full-size dust aerosol detection system's output.

This is the true color detection with a color coded area where the dust aerosol probability is higher.

El Paso's Dust Storm - Images // April 14 2012

It was a very bad day for El Paso, TX, residents. Here are the images I got (click to enlarge) and a couple of more images Tom found.

This from NASA-Terra MODIS data:

 Dust aerosol detection algorithm result.

From NASA - Aqua MODIS data

  Dust aerosol detection algorithm result.

This is an image with a higher resolution view to the dust storm:

And finally, a very nice animation of GOES IR data:

(original here on Tom's web)

Dust Storm - Southwestern US - March 18 2012

Today I had the privilege of being asked by a "Dust-Storm" expert the following:
"There is massive amounts of dust today in New Mexico and El Paso. But on the satellite I can't easily tell which is dust and which is cloud. Can you run your algorithm today and see if it differentiates them?" - Dr. Thomas Gill

Unfortunately, the algorithm was "trained" or "taught" to discriminate clouds, that is, wherever there is a cloud, don't bother searching for dust. The original premise by some NASA experts and I was that, since my algorithm uses thermal spectral bands near the infra-red spectrum, any cloud would significantly deteriorate the thermal emission of the dust aerosols; in other words: it would mess up the whole algorithm. So anyway, what I am trying to say is that all clouds are "mapped" to black (non-dusty) aerosols.

Below are the results of my algorithm. On the left we have true color images and on the right we have the output of my algorithm; on the first row is shown MODIS-Terra and on the second MODIS-Aqua, 17:35 UTC and 2050 UTC, respectively.

This dust storm was classified as "severe" and it is probably the worst in the last five years.  Here is the full overpass of MODIS-Terra and my algorithm's output...

This is the GOES East animation of the event; as you can see, there is a large number of clouds moving over the area of the incident, making almost impossible to analyze using traditional infra-red imagery.

Finally, here are some pictures of friends and videos uploaded by other people.

El Paso, TX...

Las Cruces, NM...

Albuquerque, NM...

Wow, right?

Is dust from Africa going north?

Yesterday I was looking at Terra's satellite imagery and noticed something that looked like a huge dust cloud from the north pole going south; however, after a careful review I came to the conclusion that it is the other way around: it appears that a high concentration of dust aerosols from Africa were somehow compressed into a dense dust cloud and pushed north. I may be wrong of course. Here are two images: 1) True color MODIS-Terra overpasses. 2) The output of my dust aerosol detection algorithm. (Click to zoom in)

Dust Storm in Texas Jan/22/2012 // Catching Up

This is data of the dust storm event of January 22nd, 2012.

Location: North-West Texas.
Time: Between 05:00 1/22 and 15:00 1/23 UTC

Blowing dust developed in New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma on 22 January 2012. Winds of 60-70 mph gusted Texas, and reduced visibility to 0.5 miles. A large number of individual blowing dust plumes converged into a single large blowing dust cloud. The primary large dust plume moved to the northeast Oklahoma, meanwhile, smaller dust plumes moved southeast Oklahoma and Texas panhandle regions behind a secondary cold front. 

User Footage:

RAMSDIS Data

 GOES Data

MODIS True Color Image 18:25 UTC:

LP-SVR Dust Aerosol Detector 18:25 UTC:

MODIS True Color Image 16:45 UTC:

LP-SVR Dust Aerosol Detector 18:25 UTC:

MODIS True Color Image 20:00 UTC:

LP-SVR Dust Aerosol Detector 20:00 UTC:

More information:
 http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/goes/blog/archives/9601
 http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=77006
 http://www.nbcdfw.com/weather/stories/Dust-Storm-Cancels-Flights-137865953.html
http://kfyo.com/treacherous-conditions-across-lubbock-sunday-afternoon/
http://www.mesonet.ttu.edu/cases/Duststorm_012212/20120122.html
http://blogs.wlfi.com/2012/01/22/powerhouse-spring-like-storm-now-developing-with-massive-texas-dust-storm/
http://alg.umbc.edu/usaq/archives/004445.html
http://meteorologicalmusings.blogspot.com/2012/01/photo-of-dust-storm-in-progress-at.html