The severe to extreme drought conditions in the Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico regions surrounding the panhandle of Oklahoma (see U.S. Drought Monitor: http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/) served as a source region for a large-scale dust event impacting these five states. The VIIRS and MODIS RGB Dust imagery shows this dust event well with MODIS providing an early indication of the event prior to obvious dust signatures in current GOES imagery. See the “Real-Time Data” tab on the NASA/SPoRT webpage: http://weather.msfc.nasa.gov/sport/.
At 1807 UTC MODIS imagery (see below) indicated two areas of blowing dust in the afore mentioned region. At this time the GOES visible imagery was hinting at the dust region in southeast Colorado but the GOES imagery was not clearly showing the dust in Texas. By the 1947 UTC VIIRS Dust RGB imagery (second image below), both the GOES visible and IR imagery showed the two large dust regions, but VIIRS Dust RGB imagery provided a more clear definition of the dust plume impacting north TX, originating in eastern NM. By 2202 UTC the dust plume from Colorado had fanned out and could be well seen in the GOES visible imagery (see below) impacting NM, OK, and TX while the dust from the eastern NM source region had spread across north TX and into OK. I’m sure we’ll see many photos of this extreme event over a wide area; feel free to post them to this blog.
RGB Dust Imagery from MODIS at 1807 UTC 18 March 2014 (taken from NASA/SPoRT webpage)
Dust RGB Imagery from VIIRS at 1947 UTC 18 March 2014 (taken from NASA/SPoRT webpage)
GOES Visible Imagery from 2202 UTC 18 March 2014 (taken via UCAR/RAL webpage)
Your Dust RGB images are an excellent tool for unambiguous identification of blowing dust features. There are some additional images of this event posted on the CIMSS Satellite Blog (including GOES-13 animations): http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/goes/blog/archives/15152