Deserts of Africa and the Middle East

This image runs from Northern Africa along the Middle East, dominated by vast deserts including the Sahara in Africa and the Arabian desert across Saudi Arabia and surrounding nations. To escape this arid heat, cities and towns cluster along coastlines, rivers, and in the mountains. The Atlas Mountains stretch horizontally across the top left, spanning more than 2,500 km from Morocco to Tunisia, separating the Sahara Desert from the Mediterranean Sea. Below these mountains lies the “Eye of the Sahara”—a geologic feature formally known as the Richat Structure—identifiable by its concentric rings in the dunes of Mauritania. To its right, Algeria’s Tassili n’Ajjer National Park displays a kaleidoscope of colors across 72,000 square kilometers, where granite, salt, and sand have been shaped by billions of years of variable climate. The Nile River snakes through the image’s center before the Red Sea separates Africa from the Middle East. The Nile flows over 6,600 km through northeastern Africa to the Mediterranean Sea, making it the region’s longest river. The green patch on the far right represents India’s lush vegetation.

This mosaic was compiled from 27 analysis-ready tiles from the Landsat cloud-free image composite (circa 2023) dataset created by the Global Land Analysis and Discovery (GLAD) laboratory at the University of Maryland. Together, these tiles cover a minimum of 918 Landsat Worldwide Reference System-2 scenes. To create this composite, cloud-free images from 2023 were selected for each pixel, using data from Landsat 8’s and Landsat 9’s Operational Land Imager (OLI) instruments. If no cloud-free observations were available in 2023, imagery was taken from the closest year with cloud-free data. The land surfaces on the image combine the shortwave-infrared (SWIR), near-infrared (NIR), and red bands (OLI and OLI-2 bands 6-5-4). In this band combination, healthy vegetation appears green, as it reflects near-infrared light. Sand appears tan, whereas darker colors are geological features.