On April 4, 2006, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this image showing numerous fires (marked in red) burning across the Yucatan Peninsula (top center), and the Central American countries to the south: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Although MODIS cannot tell the cause of fires, April is one of the dry-season months in the area, and it is possible that the fires are a mixture of intentional agriculture-related fires and accidental or natural forest fires.
The high-resolution image provided above has a spatial resolution of 500 meters per pixel. The MODIS Rapid Response Team provides daily subsets of the region in a variety of resolutions and formats.
References & Resources
NASA image courtesy the MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center.
