Fires in the Southern Midwest

Fires in the Southern Midwest

On April 4, 2007, dozens of fires were burning in the southern portions of the U.S. Midwest. Marked with red dots in this image from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite, the fires are scattered across Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. Winds are blowing nearly due south, stretching smoke plumes from several of the fires. Though much of the landscape has “greened up” with the arrival of spring, higher elevations, such as the Ouachita Mountains, are still showing winter brown.

The large image provided above has a spatial resolution (level of detail) of 500 meters per pixel. The MODIS Rapid Response Team provides twice-daily images of the United States in additional resolutions.

NASA image courtesy the MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center