On March 22, 2005, dozens of fires were burning across southern Mexico and several Central American countries when NASA’s Aqua satellite passed overhead. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on Aqua captured this image and detected actively burning fires, which are marked with red dots. It’s not possible for MODIS to tell what type of fire is burning, but many of these fires probably have agricultural purposes: clearing land for planting or to renew pasture grasses. However, a particularly smoky, high concentration of fires in the northwestern corner of Guatemala are located in the Laguna Del Tigre (Jaguar Lake) National Park, and are likely natural or human-caused forest fires.
References & Resources
NASA image created by Jesse Allen, Earth Observatory, using data obtained from the MODIS Rapid Response team.
