File:Mount Etna Stands Above the Dust (MODIS).jpg

English: 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.