Watch: Saharan Dust Cloud Covers the Atlantic

The NOAA visualization below depicts a giant plume of dust moving off the coast of Africa. This plume, captured by NOAA’s satellites, is known as the Saharan Air Layer, and is actually a quite common occurrence in which, according to NOAA, “a layer of tiny aerosols like sand, dirt and dust occasionally push from east to west across the tropical Atlantic Ocean during hurricane season.”

This animation uses the NOAA NGAC aerosol model to show how the plume is expected to travel across the Atlantic Basin over the next four days.