Dry conditions and gusty winds are fanning fast-moving grassland fires in southern Oklahoma and northern Texas in the first part of 2006. Several ranching and farm communities have been devastated by the blazes, some of which were as large as 40,000 acres according to local news reports. This image of the south-central United States on January 2, 2006, shows several fires in Oklahoma (north) and Texas (south). The image and fire detections (marked in red) were captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. Just south of the border between the two states, a thin, brown burn scar marks the location of the small town of Ringgold, Texas, which, according to news reports, was almost completely destroyed by a grassland fire on January 1, 2006.
NASA image created by Jesse Allen, Earth Observatory, using data obtained courtesy of the MODIS Rapid Response team.
