The marked trailing/leading asymmetry of the zodiacal cloud, first detected in the IRAS (Infrared Astronomical Satellite) data by Dermottetal. (1988), has since been confirmed by DIRBE (Reachetal., 1995). Our analysis of the DIRBE data shows that the asymmetry exists in a range of wavebands from 4.5 to 60 &mgr;m as well as at different solar elongations. We proposed (Dermottetal., 1994) that this asymmetry is caused by a trailing cloud of asteroidal dust particles that corotates with the Earth in a circumsolar ring of particles trapped in mean motion resonances. Here, we compare predictions derived from this model with the DIRBE observations and discuss the implications of the results for the sizes of the particles near the Earth, and their origin, and for the overall structure of the zodiacal cloud. ©1996 American Institute of Physics.