This category is a gallery of the images of the month
An exceptional amount of dust particles lifted by strong winds in the Sahara desert in Algeria traveled north across the Mediterranean Sea and reached Western Europe from March 15 through 18, 2022. Spain and France received especially high concentrations of dust, which brought brown-orange skies and strongly degraded air quality. The plume continued to travel […]
The 2021–2022 Southwest Indian Ocean cyclone season is currently in full swing. Southern Africa and nearby islands of Madagascar, Reunion and Mauritius are confronted with a very intense and deadly cyclone season, causing widespread damage and destruction, and displacing hundreds of thousands of people.The island of Madagascar was especially impacted as 4 of the first […]
This true-color image acquired by the Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI) on board Himawari (JMA) shows the thick round “umbrella” plume of ash rising high in the atmosphere and flattening upon reaching the tropopause. The coastlines of neighboring islands are drawn in the image, showing Tongatapu (the main island of the archipelago and host of the […]
2021/09/30 The Multispectral Instrument (MSI) on board ESA/Copernicus’s Sentinel-2 satellite captured this high-resolution imagery on September 30, 2021. The image shows the path followed by the lava flow (yellow-red) to the ocean and the thick ash plume (grey-brown) spewed by the volcano. The hot lava is revealed in yellow (hottest part) and red by the […]
The 2021 wildfire season in the Unites States was predicted to be yet another severe one. Sadly, the prediction was right. Last year’s season was unprecedented but this year was worse due to widespread dry conditions in the western United States and record heat in June that jumpstarted the fire season one month ahead of […]
Terra/MODIS 2021/03/12 10:04 UTC On March 12, 2021, the MODIS sensors on board NASA’s Terra (top) and Aqua (middle) polar-orbiting satellites and VIIRS (bottom) on board NASA/NOAA’s Suomi/NPP satellite successively collected these true-color views of the ash plume streaming from the summit and transported eastwards. Thick volcanic ash cloud appears brown at lower altitude and […]
Three major dust events occurred in February 2021 over the Sahara. During those episodes, the right meteorological conditions were met to transport large amounts of dust over France and Europe, up to Sandinavia, which is unusual in such a short tome period. Those episodes were observed across Europe, as the sky strikingly turned orange and dust was deposited on cars and on the snowy slopes of the Pyrénées and the Alps.
La Soufrière volcano in Saint-Vincent Island in the Antilles erupted April 9, 2021 at 12:45 UTC. That violent explosive eruption produced a huge ash plume that rose up to 19 km altitude. Thick ash fallout covered some areas of the island, forcing thousands of people to evacuate. The volcano kept discharging ash uninterruptedly until April […]
Sargassum algae are historically known to populate the center of the North Atlantic subtropical gyre, off Florida. However, since 2011 their region of presence has expanded drastically. Sargassum now also proliferate in a large tropical region of the Atlantic, from the Antilles to West Africa. During the 2020 edition of the Vendée Globe race, the […]