Fires in Portugal

Fires in Portugal

Fires continued to burn across dry woodlands in Portugal in mid-August 2005. High temperatures (40 degrees Celsius, 104 degrees Fahrenheit) are adding to firefighters’ difficulties in controlling the blazes, which have burned off and on in central and northern Portugal since July. This image of the region was captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite on August 16, 2005. Active fire locations have been marked with red dots. A large fire is burning in the Estrela Mountains in the center of the scene, creating a sheet of grayish smoke that fans out to the east. The high-resolution image provided above has a spatial resolution of 250 meters per pixel. The MODIS Rapid Response System provides this image at additional resolutions.

NASA image courtesy the MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center