January, 2008
February, 2008
Figure 1: Wild fires in East Siberia. Click to see the larger image (80kB).
Figure 1 is a true color image of wild fires burning a taiga in East Siberia. The site is located at about latitude 50°53'N and longitude 134°22'E, i.e. 500km southwest from the mouth of the Amur River or 300 km north from Khabarovsk (see Figure 3). It was taken by the Advanced Visible and Near Infrared Radiometer-2 (AVNIR-2) on the Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) "Daichi" on June 2, 2007 with the resolution of 10m.
The Amgun River, which is one of the tributaries of the Amur, is flowing to north in the upper left of the picture. A road and the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM) is running side by side along the river. White straight lines about 2km east from the road and rail are power transmission lines.
Along the road on the left of the image, there are two towns named Badzhal and Urkalytu. The towns are 10km apart ranging north and south. Each town has a population of a hundred and several tens of people.
Figure 2 is a close-up image of the wild fire. A red line of flares can be seen between the thick smoke from the most active area, which is estimated about 20m in width and 500m in length.
This is a typical burning pattern of subarctic forest fire. As the flare line progresses, the forest and its floor are damaged increasingly. Here the southwest wind activates the northeast part of the fire, and the black burnt-out area is spreading at the left of the fire.
The Sukachev Institute of Forest announced that 11,480,000 ha of the forests have been burnt down in all of the Russia by September 14, 2007. The area is about the same as the half of the total forest area in Japan.
On the other hand in Alaska, only 260,000 ha of the forests were burnt in the summer of 2007 though 2,670,000 ha had lost in 2004. "Wild Fire Monitoring by MODIS" in this site shows the daily status of Alaskan wild fire.
<About Figure1 and 2 >
Satellite: ALOS
Sensor: AVNIR-2
Observation date: June 2, 2007
Color: 0.61-0.69ƒÊm as Red, 0.52-0.60ƒÊm as Green, 0.42-0.50ƒÊm as Blue. This is a true color image.
Figure 2: Close-up image of the fire in Figure 1
Figure 3: Map of East Siberia
