Dust hovered over western Iran and the Persian Gulf on June 19, 2009. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite took this picture the same day. The dust follows a nearly vertical line east of the Iraq-Iran border. Aside from a subtropical climate along the coast of the Caspian Sea, Iran has a mostly arid or semiarid climate, but these dust plumes are likely a continuation of the dust storm in Iraq the previous day. The fine sediments of the Tigris and Euphrates floodplains regularly give rise to dust storms.
