Smoke from wildfires streamed across the Sea of Okhotsk in late July 2011. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this natural-color image on July 27, 2011.
Nearly 120 fires were burning in the Russian Federation as of July 28, 2011, according to EMERCOM of Russia. Nineteen of those blazes were in the Far Eastern Federal District.
Marked by tiny red dots, some actively burning fires appear just west of Sakhalin in this image, and those fires produce heavy smoke. The thick river of smoke that blows over the Sea of Okhotsk, however, appears to have originated farther west.
An expanded version of this image is available through the MODIS Rapid Response System.
NASA image courtesy the MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC. Caption by Michon Scott.
Acquired July 27, 2011, this natural-color image shows smoke from wildfires over the Sea of Okhotsk.
Fires are common in the forests of eastern Russia during the warm temperatures and dry weather of summer, and the summer of 2011 saw widespread fire and smoke.
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