Wildfire smoke blew across Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, and northeastern China on May 18, 2009. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this true-color image the same day.
Blue-gray smoke forms diagonal lines running from northwest to southeast. The larger plume is on the west, and that plume appears to widen and thicken near the Bo Hai coast. Although the sources of these smoke plumes don’t appear in this image, they probably originate near the Siberia-Mongolia border. Both natural and human-caused fires in Siberia are common in the spring and summer, as an image from western Siberia illustrates.
References & Resources
NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center. Caption by Michon Scott.
