The fire season in Queensland, Australia, officially got under way on October 1, but according to news reports from the area, fires have been springing up through late August and September, well in advance of the official date. This image of eastern Australia shows central and southern Queensland in the top and center of the image and northern New South Wales in the lower part. Captured on October 3, 2004, by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite, the image shows numerous active fires in Queensland. Fires (marked in red) run along the coast in the mountains that make up the Great Dividing Range, and another concentration of fires is located in the forested mountain region west of the Simpson Desert (left center edge) and north of the Sturt Stony Desert.
NASA image created by Jesse Allen, Earth Observatory, using data obtained from the Goddard Earth Sciences DAAC.
