A catalog of NASA images and animations of our home planet

• Credit:

  NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC. Caption by Holli Riebeek.

The large forest fire burning south of Haifa, Israel, was nearly under control when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite took this image on December 4, 2010. The active fire areas are outlined in red. A thin plume of smoke rises from the fire area and blows west over the Mediterranean Sea. The smoke plume is significantly smaller than it had been the previous day, an indicator that the fire was less intense. By the next day (December 5), MODIS no longer detected a fire in the region.

The fire started on December 2, and was extinguished on December 5. In that four day span, it burned 5,000 hectares (12,300 acres), 74 buildings, and killed 42 people, reported BBC News.

The highest resolution version of this image is the large image provided on the Earth Observatory. The image is available in additional resolutions from the MODIS Rapid Response System, which also provides twice daily images of Israel.

1. Reference

2. BBC News. (2010, December 6). Israel: Haifa forest fire extinguished. Accessed December 6, 2010.

Images & Animations

• Webmaster: Paul Przyborski
• NASA Official: Steven E. Platnick
• Database Updated: May 25, 2013