Smoke from fires over Australia captured by Envisat

This image was acquired on 7 December 2006 by Envisat’s Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument and shows the smoke arising from raging fires burning across the state of Victoria in the southeastern corner of Australia. As well as detecting the smoke billowing from major conflagrations, satellites also detect the fires themselves. For a decade now, ESA satellites have been continuously surveying fires burning across the Earth’s surface.