Smoke blows almost due east from a devastating bushfire that has ravaged nearly all the terrain of a small national park in the southern part of Western Australia. This image was captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite on February 12, 2007. The location where MODIS detected actively burning fire is outlined in red. Porongurup National Park—a small park that encompasses an ancient mountain range and, despite its small size, is home to 10 species of plants found no where else in the world—is almost completely hidden by smoke in this scene. The dramatic contrast between the area’s native, protected vegetation and areas that humans have converted to crop and pasture land is clear in this image. Stirling Range National Park is the largest preserved area in the image.
The large image provided above has a spatial resolution (level of detail) of 250 meters per pixel. The MODIS Rapid Response Team provides twice-daily images of the region in additional resolutions.
References & Resources
NASA image courtesy the MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center.
