Desert dust particles are lifted into the atmosphere by gusts of surface wind and can be transported and deposited thousands of kilometres away. 

When Saharan dust travels over populated areas, it can reduce air quality and impact health by causing respiratory problems and cause flight delays. Over the oceans, dust can act as a fertiliser, stimulating blooms of tiny marine plants (phytoplankton) that are the basis for the marine food chain.

ADD-CROSS assesses the impact of cross-channel assimilation on air quality and numerical weather prediction (NWP).

The cloud patterns are known as von Kármán vortices and are formed over the ocean when islands disrupt the wind flow. The strength of the wind affects the patterns of the swirls.

Von Kármán vortices are named after Theodore von Kármán, the pioneering Hungarian-American physicist and aeronautical engineer.

The bloom is most likely caused by coccolithophores (cyan colour) and other phytoplankton species. Phytoplankton play a key role in marine ecosystems as the basis of the food chain.

Many aeroplane contrails are also visible in the image over England, the Channel and northern France.

There is also an additional zoomed-in view (below) captured on the same day by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite, showing ships moving north through the bloom area.

This week’s image of the week is of the Earth as seen from the vantage point of our Meteosat-10 geostationary weather satellite 36,000km above our planet.

About

The purpose of this study is to help estimate the individual impacts of current Aeolus observations and future EPS-Aeolus-like observations on NWP. This goal has been achieved by incorporating NOAA OSSE simulations of both Aeolus and EPS-Aeolus, which have been generated by KNMI using the Lidar In-space Performance Analysis System (LIPAS; Marseille et al., 2003, 2011) tool.

The MIDAS project studied the use of scatterometer wind data within mesoscale Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models.