The VIIRS instrument (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on NASA’s Suomi NPP satellite collected this natural-color image which detected hundreds of fires burning in Central Africa on February 06, 2017. Most likely these fires are agricultural in nature as farmers often use fire to return nutrients to the soil and to clear the ground of unwanted plants. While fire helps enhance crops and grasses for pasture, the fires also produce smoke that degrades air quality. Each hot spot, which appears as a red mark, is an area where the thermal detectors on the VIIRS instrument recognized temperatures higher than background. When accompanied by plumes of smoke, as in this image, such hot spots are diagnostic for fire.
Included in this image are dust plumes radiating down from the Sahara Desert. The Sahara is the largest hot desert and the third largest desert in the world after Antarctica and the Arctic. Its area of 9,200,000 square kilometres is comparable to the area of the United States. The desert extends into large sections of Algeria, Chad, Egypt, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Western Sahara, Sudan and Tunisia. In the image, plumes of dust were streaming through Cote d’Ivoire, Liberia, and Sierra Leone to the southwest and the glints of sunlight capture the outline of the dust.
NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz LANCE/EOSDIS MODIS Rapid Response Team, GSFC. Caption by Lynn Jenner
Suomi NPP is managed by NASA and NOAA.