Desert dust

Under certain weather conditions, desert dust is stirred up by strong winds and carried into higher layers of the atmosphere. From there, it can be transported over long distances by large-scale air currents.

The maps show the overall dust concentrations in Europe for the next few days. Since the dust particles are distributed over large vertical areas in the atmosphere, the concentrations are added up across all altitude layers. The maps therefore do not show dust values near the ground, but rather the total amount of desert dust in the atmosphere above each individual map point at the time of observation.