As the World Burns

NASA has released a series of new satel­lite data visu­al­iza­tions that “show tens of mil­lions of fires detect­ed world­wide from space” between July 2002 and July 2011. The visu­al­iza­tions were pro­duced by the MOD­er­ate Res­o­lu­tion Imag­ing Spec­tro­ra­diome­ter, or MODIS, instru­ments onboard NASA’s Ter­ra and Aqua satel­lites. And they help sci­en­tists under­stand how fires affect our envi­ron­ment on local, region­al and glob­al scales — one of the many unex­pect­ed things that come out of NASA space mis­sions. h/t holykaw

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