October 3, 2019 - Taklamakan Desert

China’s Taklimakan Desert, a vast sand desert filled with shirting sand dunes, stretches across the Tarim Basin between the Kunlun Mountains and the Tibet Plateau to the south and the Tian Shan Mountains to the north. The Taklimakan covers an area of 130,500 sq. mi (338,000 sq. km), making it slightly larger than the state of New Mexico. The tall, shifting sand dunes cover about 85 percent of the arid land. The Tarim River flows across the basin from west-to-east. In some of these places near the river, oases created by fresh surface water supports agriculture.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on board NASA’s Terra satellite acquired a true-color image of the Taklimakan Desert. Strong winds loft dust into the atmosphere at the eastern end of the Tarim Basin, appearing to blow both to the east and to the north.

Image Facts
Satellite: Terra
Date Acquired: 9/27/2019
Resolutions: 1km (2.1 MB), 500m (6.1 MB), 250m (4.8 MB)
Bands Used: 1,4,3
Image Credit: MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC