Smoke from large forest fires in Alaska has made the rounds across several parts of the Northern Hemisphere since the fires began in mid-June 2004. The plumes of grayish-yellow smoke have drifted across Canada and out to the Atlantic, southward to Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico, and eastward over the Bering Strait to Russia. In this scene, smoke from fires located in the top center of the scene, in east-central Alaska, is spreading southward along the western arc of the Alaska Range Mountains and the Alaska Peninsula. Below and to the left of center, the smoke breaks eastward across the mountain barrier and streams out over the Gulf of Alaska in two parallel paths—north and south of Kodiak Island. The smoke is getting swirled into a counter clockwise-spinning region of low atmospheric pressure in Gulf. This image was captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite on August 29, 2004.
NASA image by Jesse Allen, based on data from the MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA-GSFC
