At the turning of the season from harvest to planting, farmers on the fertile plain in the shadow of the Himalayas set fire to their fields and veil the land in smoke. This photo-like image was taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite on November 9, 2010.
The tightly clustered fires are marked in red, and puffs of opaque smoke rise blend into a thick white pall. The fires burn for several weeks every year, and you can monitor them with twice-daily images of northwestern India and Pakistan provided by the MODIS Rapid Response Team.
NASA image courtesy the MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC. Caption by Holli Riebeek.
