File:Fires in western Canada and United States (MODIS 2017-08-10).jpg

English: Multiple fires continued to burn in western Canada and the United States in early August 2017. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired this true-color image on August 5.

Most of the fires are clustered in tinder-dry vegetation in Caribou Fire Center in British Columbia, Canada, between the snow-topped Coast Mountains and the inland Rocky Mountains. Intense smoke from the fires rose high into the atmosphere, rolled over the Coast Mountains, and poured along the coast and south to blanket parts of the states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana in the United States. A broad bank of low cloud (fog) sits over the Pacific Ocean and the low-lying coast of British Columbia. Additional red hot spots, marking actively burning fires, are scattered across the northwestern United States.

Multiple fires have been burning the region from late spring, with intense fires reported from early in July. According to a story published in the Times Colonist on August 9, seventeen new fires started in British Columbia on August 7 from lightning strikes, with 11 more igniting on August 8. This brings the total number of fires in the province to 928. About 500 of these were ignited due to natural causes, while 364 are listed as human-caused.