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Fires in the Yucatan Peninsula April 2015

Fires in the Yucatan Peninsula April 2015
Dozens of red hot spots cover Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.

Dozens of red hot spots cover Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Each of those hot spots, which appear as a red mark, is an area where the thermal detectors on the MODIS instrument recognized temperatures higher than background. When accompanied by plumes of smoke such hot spots are indicative of fire. NASA’s Terra satellite collected this natural-color image with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, MODIS, instrument on April 20, 2015.
Since it is April it is quite likely that many of these fires in this region are biomass fires deliberately set to manage land for agriculture, especially in forest clearing, working cropland, and renewing pastures. Some, too, may be wildfires since this is the dry season in that area. Natural (lightning) or accidental (carelessness) sources can also cause an outbreak of wildfire. As the dry season progresses, the number of fires tend to grow, as will the pall of smoke which settles over the land.
The shiny, silver-toned band aligned in a north-to-south direction is not smoke. It is sunglint – the mirror-like reflection of the Sun off the water surface.
NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz LANCE/EOSDIS MODIS Rapid Response Team, GSFC. Caption by Lynn Jenner