• Rare dust storm, hail, and extreme winds hit Harbin as multi-hazard event unfolds in Northeast China

    A rare dust storm accompanied by winds of up to 148 km/h (92 mph) struck Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, at around 17:00 LT on May 31, causing widespread damage, reducing visibility to less than 100 m (328 feet), and disrupting transportation and public events across the city. The same atmospheric setup also produced a tornado in Changling County, Jilin Province, as a broader outbreak of severe weather affected parts of Northeast China.

  • Exceptionally large dust event for western Europe and Mediterranean

    Huge amounts of dust are advecting toward western Europe and the western Mediterranean this weekend, with parts of France, Spain and Italy expected to be the most impacted. The event is caused by a broad cold core upper low pushing from Morocco into the Iberian…

  • Asian Dust blankets Korean Peninsula and wide swath of Japan

    After engulfing a large part of northern China, including capital Beijing on Thursday, May 4, 2017, dust storm from Mongolia reached the Korean Peninsula and Japan over the weekend. In China, the storm reduced visibility to less than 1 km (0.62 miles) and forced…

  • Major dust storm engulfs northern China, Beijing

    A major dust storm is blowing across northern China today, May 4, 2017, turning the sky yellow, dragging down air quality and causing travel disruptions. The storm is reaching capital Beijing, where weather authorities issued this year's first dust and sand…

  • Dust storms on the Arabian Peninsula

    Dust storms continued on the Arabian Peninsula from late February into early March. This image, acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite on March 3, 2012, shows a dust plume spanning hundreds of kilometers.