NASA official's recent report is talking about the submissions made by a NASA spacecraft, which has been keeping tabs over a vast dust storm on Mars since November.

According to the submitted details by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), the Martian dust storm was first spotted on the planet on Nov 10, which has since them bought major changes in the Martian atmosphere that have even been felt by two other rovers on the planet's surface.

The agency's Mars rover Opportunity has confirmed a decline in the atmospheric clarity due to the storm whereas the newer Curiosity rover with a built-in weather station has reported a drop in the planet's air pressure along with a slight increase in the planet's nighttime temperatures (halfway around the planet from Opportunity).

"This is now a regional dust storm," Mr. Rich Zurek, NASA's chief Mars scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement Wednesday. "It has covered a fairly extensive region with its dust haze and it is in a part of the planet were some regional storms have grown into global dust hazes".

NASA is trying to prepare a complete picture of the storm for which it has already started combining the observations submitted by the Curiosity rover and MRO.