Western Africa Fire Season
Western Africa Fire Season
6 December 2006
In western Africa south of the Sahara Desert the agricultural fire season was clearly underway when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASAs Aqua satellite passed overhead on 4 December 2006, and captured this image. Places where MODIS detected actively burning fires are marked with red dots. Hundreds of fires are scattered across Nigeria, Cameroon, and the Central African Republic. People in Africa have been using fire to manage agricultural lands for hundreds, possibly thousands of years, and while the fires may not be immediately hazardous, such large-scale burning can have a strong impact on weather, climate, human health, and naturalresources.
The high-resolution image provided above has a spatial resolution of 250 meters perpixel.
(source: EarthObservatory).
