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Climate change and global warming have played an essential role in human history, causing many large cultures to collapse and local people to vanish. In this study, three dust detection indices retrieved from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) products for detecting Sand-Dust Storms (SDSs) in Iraq were adapted. The Brightness Temperature Difference (BTD), Normalized Difference Dust Index (NDDI), and Middle East Dust Index (MEDI) are three metrics. A practical example of an SDS event occurring on 5 August 2008 was studied with the proposed indices to demonstrate the capability of these indices to detect the SDSs in Iraq and validate their output based on the estimated threshold analysis. Generally, all the indices offer simple means for detecting or extracting the studied SDS events according to the contaminated area, with an average detection error varying between the three indices. The polygons of the detected contaminated area were calculated for each index and compared with the whole study area, the detection error between contaminated and not contaminated pixels for the three indices images are 12.6% for NDDI, 10.7% for BTD, and 8.5% for MEDI so from these error results we can say that MEDI index is more suitable for detecting SDSs events over Iraq. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]