An extremely large dust storm occurred over China in early April, 2001:

7 April 2001

8 April 2001

9 April 2001

The event was large enough and intense enough to be transported across the Pacific to North America. The sequence of images above and below show the Aerosol Index measured by Earth Probe TOMS (Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer) during this event.

Since the images below straddle the international date line, two dates are shown on each image. The first corresponds to the date that data were taken west of the date line and the second corresponds to the date that data were taken east of the date line.

Three QuickTime movies are also available: one small (64k), one medium (185k), and one large (514k).

NOTE: The surface background image used here is NOT part of the TOMS aerosol index retrieval. Also, the performance of Earth Probe TOMS has begun to degrade rapidly. This has affected the calibration and, as a result, a scan bias has developed in the data. This scan bias is noticeable in some of these images.

April 6/5, 2001	April 7/6, 2001	April 8/7, 2001	April 9/8, 2001
April 10/9, 2001	April 11/10, 2001	April 12/11, 2001	April 13/12, 2001
April 14/13, 2001	April 15/14, 2001	April 16/15, 2001	April 17/16, 2001

Here is the color scale for the Aerosol Index used in the images above