As of Monday morning, June 12, 2006, the Parks Highway Fire was burning just one mile southeast of the small town of Nenana, Alaska. Having burned up to 41,000 acres in a mixture of spruce forest, tundra, and grass, the blaze was threatening residences, native land allotments, commercial property, and infrastructure. This image shows the blaze, with actively burning areas outlined in red, observed by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite on June 10, 2006.
Nenana sits at the junction of the Nenana River with the Tanana River, which flows northwest into the Yukon. Nenana is both a traditional village for native Athabascan Tribes, as well as an historic European settlement. The Alaska Railroad runs through the region and crosses the Tanana River at Nenana.
The high-resolution image provided above has a spatial resolution of 250 meters per pixel. The MODIS Rapid Response System provides daily images of this area at additional resolutions.
Information on fires in Alaska is provided by the Alaska Interagency Coordination Center, and the National Interagency Fire Center.
NASA image courtesy the MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center
