We had the honor to be invited by Dr Pawan Gupta from the NASA Applied Remote Sensing Training (ARSET) team to give a presentation about our World Air Quality Index project at the Earth Observations and Tools for Air Quality Applications webinar:

For those who could not attend the training and would like to get our presentation, you can download it from this link: waqi-arset-v1.2.pdf (the full webinar content is also available from the arset-aq website).

During the webinar session, Dr Pawan Gupta presented the Dust Storm which started on April 2015 2nd and moved from the Arabic Peninsula towards India in just few days.

The animation below is showing this dust storm, based on the MODIS imagery.

Since the use Aerosol Optical Depth over arid/desertic areas is still an active area of research (due to surface reflectance issue, read more from this article or that article), it is unfortunately not possible to use the dust score overlay to highlight the dust zones over the arabic peninsula.

So, instead, we are using a new processing concept to tentatively highlight the dust zone (highlighted in blue in the animation, and over the land only).