Fires burned in and around Mozambique in mid-September 2009. Each September, near the end of Africa’s dry season, the region glows with a combination of agricultural fires and wildfires. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image of the fires on September 17, 2009. In this true-color image, faint red outlines indicate hotspots where MODIS detected unusually warm surface temperatures associated with fires. Although discernible via satellite, especially over the Indian Ocean, the smoke on September 17, 2009, didn’t match the massive smoke plume from the same region a year earlier.
NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team. Caption by Michon Scott.
