Fires on Madagascar
Fires on Madagascar
9 November 2006
On 6 November 2006, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASAs Aqua satellite captured this image of widespread fires burning across the island of Madagascar, which lies off the southeast coast of Africa. Fires, marked in red, are burning across many different ecosystems: in and around the rainforests (deep green strip) that parallel the eastern coast; the humid grasslands (green) along the east coast; and the drier grasslands that cover most of the rest of the island(light brown).
AQUA
6 November 2006 
Nearly all of these fires are likely agricultural in origin, with people setting fires to clear farmland and pasture. Some fires in the rainforest may be slash-and-burn fires in which rainforest is cleared to make way for agricultural land.
The high-resolution image provided above has a spatial resolution of 250 meters per pixel.
(source: EarthObservatory).
