English: The Bodélé Depression, located in Chad, sits on the edge of the Sahara Desert and is one of the world’s most active sources of dust storms. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard NASA’s Terra satellite acquired a true-color image of one of the often-massive dust storms on December 25, 2017.

The pale beige dust rises from the Bodele Depression in the northeast section of the image and pours southwestward across parts of four additional countries. Counter clock-wise these countries are Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon, and the Central Africa Republic. A dusty haze covers the entire image and suggests that this particular storm reaches farther than this limited viewing area.

The body of water seen under the dust in the southwest section of Chad is Lake Chad. Once compared to the size of New Jersey or Lake Erie, in North America, Lake Chad only retains about 5 percent of its size in 1966. Much of the northern part of the lake has become desert. The shrinking of Lake Chad has been linked to decline in rainfall as well as irrigation and impacts the complex humanitarian crisis in the region as large numbers of people in the region are dependent primarily on this lake for their primary water supply.