During 18-19 February 2016 several dust outbreaks occurred over China.
22 October 2020
17 February 2016
By HansPeter Roesli (Switzerland)
Driven by westerly winds, the dust swept through the country, partially as far as the East China Sea.
The conditions over these two days were quite cloudy, so the dust is difficult to identify.
Only the sequence of half-hourly Dust RGBs in this very fast animation , 18 Feb 00:00 UTC–19 Feb 23:30 UTC reveals some of the dust sources and streamers.
Two Dust RGB images offer the opportunity to pinpoint a couple of the many dust sources.
The VIIRS overflight on 18 February close to 07:00UTC (Figure 2) shows sources labelled A and B on either side of the Qilian mountains.
On the image from Himawari-8 taken 31 hours later (Figure 3) new sources of dust (labelled 1 and 2) appeared further east on either side of the borderline between the provinces of Qinghai and Gansu.
It looks like the dust sources shown in Figure 2 had a relatively short outreach, while those shown in Figure 3 were farther reaching.
Dust cloud from China expected to reach Taiwan today (Taipei Times)
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