Map view showing fires and smoke over Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Belize, and the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico on May 21, 2024. This region has been experiencing high temperatures and decreased rainfall due to El Niño conditions causing wildfires and drought. Honduras especially has experienced very poor air quality due to ongoing fires and extensive smoke.
The left (A side) image displays the Fires and Thermal Anomalies layer, where each point represents the center of a 375 m pixel where a fire or similar thermal anomaly has been detected. The right (B side) image shows high Aerosol Index values over Honduras from the fires.
The Aerosol Index is a unitless value that ranges from < 0 to >= 5, where 5 (indicated by areas of dark red) indicates heavy concentrations of aerosols that could reduce visibility or impact human health, such as smoke in the lower troposphere (approximately 1-3 km above Earth's surface) from biomass burning.
The base true-color corrected reflectance images were acquired by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) aboard the joint NASA/NOAA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite. Overlaid on the base image is the VIIRS Fires and Thermal Anomalies layer (A side image) and the Aerosol Index layer from the Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS) instrument (B side image). Near real-time wildfire data and information about individual fires are available through NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS).
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