Using MISR to View Dust

On October 18, 2002, a large dust plume extended across countries bordering the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Information on the horizontal and vertical extent of the dust are provided by these views from the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR). The left-hand panel portrays the scene as viewed by the instrument's vertical-viewing (nadir) camera. Here only some of the dust over eastern Syria and southeastern Turkey can be discerned. The dust is much more obvious in the center panel, which is a view from MISR's most steeply forward-looking camera. The right-hand panel is an elevation field derived from automated MISR stereoscopic processing, in which the heights of clouds and certain parts of the dust plume are retrieved. Clouds within the image area are situated between about 2 and 5.5 kilometers above sea level, and the dust is located below most of the cloud, at heights of about 1.5 kilometers or less.

See http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/select/