Fires in Australia

Fires in Australia

10 January 2008

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Fires in Fitzgerald River National Park, Australia

In southern Western Australia’s Fitzgerald River National Park, lightning triggered half a dozen fires on 9 January 2008. The fires grew rapidly over the span of a few hours, and when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite passed over the area and captured this picture, the sensor detected several actively burning areas (marked in red) that were not detectable in an image captured just a few hours before by the Terra satellite. Although the image is somewhat blurry because the park was just at the edge of the sensor’s field of view, it is still easy to see the thick smoke plume and the sharp difference in the land surface between the vegetation of the park (dark green) and the surrounding agricultural areas (lighter green and tan).

AQUA
9 January 2008

The large image provided above has a spatial resolution (level of detail) of 250 meters per pixel.

(source: earth observatory)

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