Deadly wildfires in southern Greece wafted thick clouds of smoke over the Ionian Sea and southward to the Mediterranean in late August 2007. This image of Greece was captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite on August 26, and places where MODIS detected actively burning fires are outlined in red. A line of fires stretches along the western coast of Greece’s Peloponnesus Peninsula. To the northeast, a large fire is casting a plume of smoke over Athens.
According to news reports from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), at least 60 people had been killed by the fires as of August 27. Hundreds of homes had been burned and thousands had to evacuate. The government suspects that the fires were caused by arson, and it has declared a national emergency to deal with the situation.
The large image provided above has a spatial resolution (level of detail) of 250 meters per pixel. The MODIS Rapid Response Team provides twice-daily images of the region in additional resolutions and formats, including an infrared-enhanced version that highlights burn scars.
NASA image courtesy the MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center
