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Hi. I’m Kel Elkins from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio.

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What connects the world’s largest desert to the world’s largest

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rainforest? Dust. And lots of it. Each year, dust from the Saharan Desert

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in Africa is swept up into the atmosphere, where it travels across the Atlantic Ocean

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towards the Amazon Rainforest in South America. On average,

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a staggering 27 million tons of African dust is deposited into the Amazon

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Basin each year. So much dust is deposited in the Amazon that

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scientists credit the phosphates found in the dust with fertilizing the Amazon Rainforest

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and keeping it as lush as it is. I was tasked with creating this data-driven visualization

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to tell the story of African Dust. The textures you see on these walls were created using data

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from NASA’s CALIPSO satellite, which measures aerosols in the atmosphere.

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These walls are compared with the satellite imagery taken from the same time period.

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The hazy brown sections of the images are areas where dust is present in the atmosphere.

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Viewing the CALIPSO data walls sequentially allows us to follow the dust as

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it travels across the ocean and makes it’s way toward South America. This next section

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describes dust flux – or how much dust moves through a region over a period of time.

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The amount of dust in the atmosphere varies with season, and has a lot to do with how much rain

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Africa gets. This was a particularly tricky dataset to visualize.

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I elected to use a particle system that emits particles at a rate and velocity relative

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to the measured flux for a region, and we can see how those particle shapes evolve over the

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seasons. The piece was well received by the media, with versions of the visualization running

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on Time, Discovery, the Washington Post, and weather.com.