Haze over Southwestern India

Haze over Southwestern India

12 December 2006

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A plume of haze descended over Mumbai, India, on 2 December 2006. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) flying onboard NASA’s Aqua satellite took this picture the same day. In this image, the haze appears as a translucent band, slightly darker than the wispy clouds to thenorthwest. Underneath the haze, a greenish plume of sediment appears in the ocean off the coast of India.

AQUA
2 December  2006

Although the origin of the plume was not clear from adjacent satellite imagery, it could have originated in India itself. Aerosols—minute particles suspended in the atmosphere—can sometimes move in a gyre around India, following the path of the Ganges toward the Bay of Bengal, circling around the southern tip of the subcontinent, then re-approaching the country from the Arabian Sea.

The high-resolution image provided above has a spatial resolution of 250 meters perpixel.

(source: EarthObservatory).

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