NASA has recently revealed a stunning animation showing massive dust storms the size of America engulfing huge swathes of northern Mars. These windblown dust storms on Mars are well known and can span local, regional or even global in scale.

According to The Knowridge Science Report, the Harvard astronomers say the dust storms on Mars are even stranger than thought with a unique bubble, pebble or cotton texture. Astronomers studying Mars spotted yellow clouds on its surface in the 1870's.

The dust storms display the visible structures, sometimes periodic with wavelike features, or in other cases streaky or plume-like. The structures storms are called "textured dust storms" and they result from strong winds or other meteorological effects that lift dust into the Martian atmosphere.

Mail Online has reported that the dust can affect the atmospheric heating of the Martian surface and other climatic processes. The dust form despite being the huge study for more than a century still remain a mystery.

CfA astronomer Huiqun Wang and two colleagues have been using the Mars Global Surveyor images to analyze textured dust storms. But the researchers do not understand the textured storms over the surface of the planet and how much dust is actually swept up.

The Mars Global Surveyor is launched in 1999. The MSG has provided about four years of daily global data that are particularly suitable for studying various aspects of clouds and dust storms. The scientific research is focussing on the dust storms on Mars that occurred between May 1999 and October 2006 that includes a global dust storm in June 2001.

The NASA scientists have manually marked the position of each text dust storm in the MGS image, and they categorize the texture into one of three new categories. The finding new three categorize have preferred season and distinctive location.

However, the pebbled storms occur frequently in the southern mid-latitude. But the new links between storm texture type and metrological conditions that can lead to understanding the Martian climate.