In India, forest fires peak during the dry months of March or April before the arrival of the monsoon. This is quite visible in this NOAA/NASA Suomi NPP satellite image taken on March 29, 2019 where hundreds of fires appear as red points. Just last month on February 21, India suffered a debilitating forest fire which spread quickly through the Bandipur Tiger Reserve and National Park in the southern part of India. Affected by the fire were tigers, elephants, spotted deer, bisons and antelopes. It was such a severe fire that it took firefighters five days to douse the flames and 10,920 acres were affected. So too, the current phase of hot, dry weather leads to increasingly dry undergrowth and high winds that fan the flames. This satellite image shows the fires clustered in the northern part of the country near Chhattisgarh and south down to Telangana.
NASA’s Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) Worldview application provides the capability to interactively browse over 700 global, full-resolution satellite imagery layers and then download the underlying data. Many of the available imagery layers are updated within three hours of observation, essentially showing the entire Earth as it looks “right now.” Image Courtesy: NASA Worldview, Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS). Caption: Lynn Jenner