July 31, 2022 - Siberia Shrouded in Smoke
Fires in Russia
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A massive cloud of thick smoke and cloud obscured more than 275,700
square miles (443,696 square km) of Siberia from satellite view in late
July 2022. That’s larger than the country of Morocco. It’s also larger
than the state of Texas, the second-largest state in the United States.
The smoke was rising from many dozens of fires burning across lush
taiga and peat soils, primarily in Yakutia (Sakha Republic) and
Khabarovsk Krai, Russia. In the southeast, smoke reaches over the
coastal Sea of Okhotsk.
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on board
NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired a true-color image of the scene on July
23. Each red “hot spot” marks an area where the thermal bands on the
MODIS instrument have detected high temperatures. When accompanied by
smoke (as in this image), such hot spots are diagnostic for actively
burning fires.
Fires have been burning in the region since at least late April. On May
10, several media outlets reported that Russian President Vladmir Putin
said, in a meeting shown on state TV, that the Siberian fires were
posing significant material damage and posing a threat to life, the
environment, and the economy, and urged regional officials deal with
the forest fires. On the weekend before his speech, at least eight
people had been killed and hundreds of buildings destroyed. At that
time, 4,000 fires had burned about 270,000 hectares.
Since May, the fires have intensified. According to Sakha’s emergencies
ministry, 51 fires burned across roughly 9,737 hectares (38 square
miles) on July 18 in Sakha alone. More than 500 people were fighting
the fires in Sakha, and thousands more were deployed to fire fronts
across Russia, according to Russia’s ministry of emergency situations
(EMERCOM).
On July 29, The Siberian Times tweeted “Wildfires rage across Yakutia,
Russia’s coldest & largest territory, with more than 150,000 hectares
on fire. Air quality in the republic’s capital is polluted to more than
36 times above the norm; there is a ban to enter the woods for 21 days
in all of Yakutia”. A follow-up tweet on July 30 stated, “the overall
territory burned by wildfires has reached 325,000 hectares”.
For the past two years, Sakha Republic (Yakutia) has endured unusually
severe fire seasons. In 2021, more than 8.4 million hectares of forests
burned in Sakha, nearly four times the long-term average.
Image Facts
Satellite: Aqua
Date Acquired: 7/23/2022
Resolutions: 1km (501.1 KB), 500m (1.6 MB), 250m (4.5 MB)
Bands Used: 1,4,3
Image Credit: MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC
https://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/individual.php?db_date=2022-07-31
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