Large fires in eastern Alaska’s Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge were billowing out thick plumes of yellowish smoke when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this natural-color image on July 30, 2009. The smoke appears to be relatively close to the ground; in many places, brighter clouds lie over top of the smoke. The large version of the image shows that the smoke covers a wide area of Alaska and western Canada.
NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team. Caption by Rebecca Lindsey.
