South America’s annual fire season was well underway when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image on August 16, 2010. Outlined in red, fires are scattered across the southern Amazon Basin in northern Bolivia. Forested land is dark green. Grasslands or cleared lands are brown. Most of the fires shown in this image are burning in crops, grassland or on the edge of the forest.
Gray-white smoke hangs over Bolivia. The thickest smoke is concentrated along the Andes Mountains, which are forming a barrier trapping most of the smoke in the east. Some smoke seeps into the dry highlands west of the mountains through valleys.
The large image is the highest-resolution version of the image, but the image is available in additional resolutions from the MODIS Rapid Response System.
NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC. Caption by Holli Riebeek.
