File:Fires in central Russia (MODIS 2016-09-16).jpg

English: Late summer in central Russia typically brings dropping temperatures, yellowing larch trees, and rain – so much rain that it typically puts an end to any lingering summer forest fires. However, rain has been scarce in many parts of Russia in the summer of 2016, allowing a fierce forest fire season to continue into mid-September.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite flew over central Russia on September 13 and captured this true-color image. The northern landscape is washed in yellows, reflecting the golden color of the needle-like leaves of the larch – a deciduous conifer which dominates the northern forests. The far north has already turned tan, indicating the trees have lost their leaves as the weather cools. A bank of cloud covers the green forests of south-central Russia, where the dominant trees are conifers such as Siberian Pine, which stay green year-round.

This autumnal backdrop is speckled with dozens of red hotspots – areas where the thermal sensors on the MODIS instrument detected high temperatures. Smoke pours from most of these hotspots, marking actively burning fires. Also evident, especially in the western section of the image, are large charcoal-black burn scars. These are areas where fires have burned very recently – likely this summer – leaving behind only blackened vegetation. The charcoal color and ragged edges can easily be distinguished from the deep blue and distinct, clear-cut edges of water backed up behind Vilyuy Dam, located near the center of the image.

In addition to the actively burning fires and the blackened burn scars, fainter burn scars can be seen in patchwork across the region. Some are nearly black with only a hint of green, while some areas appear as simply a different color of green from the surrounding forests. Fires in remote regions of Siberia are often allowed to burn until they extinguish themselves, and large portions of forest (known as taiga in Russia) are lost on a near-annual basis in Siberia, although the number of fires burning this late in the season is unusual.