English: A large blanket of dust rolled southward over eastern Iran on May 27, 2021. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on board NASA’s Terra acquired a true-color image of the spectacular storm on that same day.

A system moving from west to east across the Caspian Sea and along the border with Turkmenistan (north of the edge of the image) appears to be the source of the wind that kicked up dust for more than 550 miles (885 km). In several areas, the dust is so thick that it obscures the land from view.

Iran is mostly arid or semiarid, with deserts making up at least 25 million hectares (100,000 square miles) of the country’s area. Dust storms are a common natural hazard. Sometimes called haboobs, dramatic dust storms like this one are often associated with weather fronts and may appear as walls of sand and dust marching across the landscape. Haboobs tend to be abrupt and short-lived.