Sometimes dust storms are just cool to watch, as well. In this series of images from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA’s Aura satellite, the dust from a Saharan sand storm blows several thousand kilometers over the North Atlantic and Europe in April 2011. OMI observed the Saharan dust on April 5, 2011, as it was blowing over Morocco and Algeria (top left image). 
Though Saharan dust blows through Europe several times a year, “the scale of this cloud and the amount of dust is somewhat unusual, including the amount of dust transported to the northern and eastern parts of Europe,” “Dust clouds can travel long distances under the right conditions.
