February 27, 2019
Fire on Mount Kenya
A fire high on the slopes of Mount Kenya in February 2019 charred thousands of hectares of moorland within Mount Kenya National Park.
Satellites began to detect evidence of fire on the mountain’s eastern slope on February 23, 2019. Warm, windy weather caused the blaze to spread rapidly over the following week. On February 27, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite acquired these natural- and false-color images. The second image, which includes bands of shortwave infrared light, reveals the burn scar left in the wake of the fire. Warm areas associated with active fires appear orange.
Heavy rain in early March helped hundreds of firefighters and soldiers slow the fire’s spread.
References & Resources
- BBC (2019, February 28) Mount Kenya wildfire: Marijuana farmers blamed. Accessed March 4, 2019.
- The Citizen (2019, April 3) Heavy rains to the rescue after Kenyan fire causes massive destruction. Accessed March 4, 2019.
- The Star (2019, March 1) Wildfire destroys 24,710 acres of moorland in Mt Kenya Park. Accessed March 4, 2019.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Adam Voiland, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS/LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Caption by Adam Voiland.
