• MODIS Pic of the Day 31 July 2022

    From Dan Richter@1:317/3 to All on Sun Jul 31 12:01:00 2022
    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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