August 28, 2022 - An Appalling Pall over the Amazon
Fires in Brazil
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A thick, gray blanket of smoke hung over the Amazon Rainforest in late
August 2022, pumped into the atmosphere by hundreds of fires burning in
Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil. The Moderate Resolution Imaging
Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on board NASA’s Terra satellite acquired a
true-color image of fires and smoke on August 26.
Each red “hot spot” marks a location where the thermal bands on the
MODIS instrument detected high temperatures. When combined with typical
smoke, as in this image, such hot spots are diagnostic for actively
burning fire. Fires in the Amazon tend to peak in August and September,
which is near the end of the dry season. Fire is used to manage
agricultural land, and also widely used to destroy forest in this
region so that, once stripped of rainforest, the land can be used to
make profits in agriculture or industry. Areas that were deforested in
previous years are also at higher risk of severe wildfire, and the risk
of severe wildfire is greatest at the end of the dry season.
Deforestation in Brazil's Amazon rainforest has already reached a
record high at the end of June 2022, according to Brazilian government
data. The national space research agency, INPE estimated that 3,988
square km (1,540 square miles) were cleared in the first six months of
the year—an area roughly five times the size of New York City. That’s
the highest level of deforestation since record-keeping began in
mid-2015.
INPE was also quoted as reporting that on August 22, satellite
monitoring detected 3,358 fires in Brazil. This is the highest number
of fires in the Brazilian Amazon for any 24-hour period since September
2007. The article states, “The number was nearly triple that recorded
on the so-called "Day of Fire"—August 10, 2019—when farmers launched a
coordinated plan to burn huge amounts of felled rainforest in the
northern state of Para.”
And, of course, the Amazon Rainforest stretches over eight countries,
not just Brazil. Although deforestation is occurring at an increasing,
alarming, and appalling rate in Brazil, as this image demonstrates,
other countries are also destroying the Amazon Rainforest at a rapid
rate. Here we can see that copious fires and deforestation are also
occurring in Peru and Bolivia in August 2022.
Image Facts
Satellite: Terra
Date Acquired: 8/26/2022
Resolutions: 1km (1.9 MB), 500m (4.2 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=2022-08-28
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