A thick pall of smoke hung over several thousand square kilometers in the Central Mountains of the Dominican Republic on March 24, 2005, when this image was captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. Even through the smoke, MODIS detected several actively burning fires (red dots). March is typically a dry month for the island of Hispaniola, which is home to Haiti as well. As of March 25, the cause of the fires, which began in a national park near Pico Duarte, the island’s highest peak, had not been reported.
NASA image created by Jesse Allen, Earth Observatory, using data obtained from the MODIS Rapid Response team.
