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Hundreds of fires were burning in southern Mexico and the northern Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua on April 26, 2005, when this hazy image of the region was captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. Locations where MODIS detected actively burning fires are marked in red. A thick layer of smoke hovers over the region and spreads northward into the Gulf of Mexico and eastward to the Caribbean Sea. The smoke is so bad that as of April 27, the international airport in Honduras had been closed for six straight days. March-May is the region’s dry season, and these fires are likely a mixture of forest fires and agricultural fires.
The high-resolution image provided above is 250 meters per pixel. The MODIS Rapid Response System provides this image at
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Image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA-GSFC
