Smoke from Alaskan wildfires over Southern United States

  • Credit

    Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC

This image of the southern United States from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Terra satellite is a picture-perfect example of what meteorologists mean when they describe the atmosphere as a fluid. In the center of the image, an airborne river of smoke from fires raging across Alaska is flowing down the Mississippi River corridor and spreading out across the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico, at the bottom of the scene. Thick smoke hangs over Louisiana (bottom center) as well as Texas, to the west, and Arkansas to the north. MODIS captured the image on July 19, 2004.

Metadata

  • Sensor

    Terra/MODIS

  • Visualization Date

    2004-07-19