December 10, 2022 - Mount Etna Stands Above the Dust

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Dust briefly clouded the skies over Sicily in early December 2022, yet
the Italian island’s iconic volcano still managed to put on a show.

On December 7, 2022, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer
(MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite acquired this true-color image of
dust blowing over the Mediterranean Sea and southern Italy. The
snow-capped peak of Mount Etna is clearly visible poking out above the
thick cloud of dust.

The dust originated in the Sahara Desert, carried by southerly winds
known as the scirocco. (In North Africa, these same desert winds are
known as “chrom” (hot) or “arifi” (thirsty)). The warm, dry air mass
picks up moisture over the Mediterranean as it moves north toward areas
of lower pressure. The systems usually produce fog or light rain, which
can combine with the dust and fall as mud.

The scirocco on December 7 failed to deliver any rain to Sicily, and
skies that day stayed quite dusty according to Boris Behncke, a
volcanologist at the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia,
who spoke with NASA’s Earth Observatory’s Kathryn Hansen. The thick
haze obscured Behncke’s ground-based view of Mount Etna, 20 kilometers
(12 miles) away. However, a close look at the satellite image reveals a
snowcapped peak surrounded by a “halo” of clear air. Behncke thinks
this suggests that the dust was relatively low in altitude.

A small eruption has been ongoing at Mount Etna since November 27,
2022. The lava is not visible in the true-color satellite image on this
page, but it has been detected with sensors on the Sentinel-2 and
Landsat satellites that can make observations in the infrared. Another
eruption was ongoing at Stromboli, a volcanic island located about 64
kilometers (40 miles) north of Sicily. However, any view of the island
in this image (top) is completely obscured by dust.

Image Facts
Satellite: Terra
Date Acquired: 12/7/2022
Resolutions: 1km (1.4 MB), 500m (3.9 MB), 250m (3 MB)
Bands Used: 1,4,3
Image Credit: MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC



https://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/individual.php?db_date=2022-12-10

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