• Meteor shower grounds Springer fire air support

    A possible fireball or meteor shower grounded planes fighting the Springer fire near Lake George in the Pike National Forest, Colorado. A Pueblo air-dispatch center began receiving reports of “balls of fire or something in the air” at 2:37 p.m. local time on

  • Smoky haze stretching over China, Korea and Japan

    A smoky haze stretches from Russia to China, over the Bohai Sea, the Korean Peninsula and the Tsushima Strait, and towards Japan. The haze is just reaching Kyushu, the third largest island in Japan, visible in the lower right quadrant. Although haze is a common

  • Spring fires and smoke in eastern Asia

    Russian officials announced that twenty-one forest fires were burning on May 17 on a total of over 3,000 hectares, with 2,600 hectares blazing in Buryatia and almost 500 hectares in Khabarovsk territory. Three new fires were seen in Tunkinsky National Park in the past

  • White Sands dust storm

    Dust from the White Sands dune field in New Mexico rises thousands of feet from the valley floor and drifts over the snowy peaks of the Sacramento Mountains driven by southwesterly winter winds. White Sands National Monument lies in the 50 kilometer (31 mile) wide

  • Dust seen over Russia

    In late April 2012, dust mingled with clouds over the eastern Russian Federation. The dust likely originated along the border between China and Mongolia and followed a counter-clockwise arc into eastern Russia. Fires along the China-Mongolia border may also have

  • Agricultural fires in Indochina seen from satellite

    Late winter or early spring is the time scheduled for farmers in Southeast Asia for preparing land for seasonal agriculture, usually for planting crops. On February 14, 2012, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite