Satellite images from this Monday (5), day of the Amazon, and from the morning of this Tuesday (6) show a gray layer over the Amazon. It is the smoke from the thousands of fires that have consumed the biome in recent days.
The gray cloud is concentrated, especially, in the south of the state of Amazonas, with Rondônia and Acre also covered.
One of the NOAA (United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) profiles on Twitter posted an animation of the huge plume of smoke and said: “There are apparently several mists of gray smoke over central South America this morning. [6]”.
The agency adds that the smoke is derived from numerous fires that are induced by drought and human action.
In the first five days of September alone, 14,839 fires were registered, almost the same value recorded in the whole of September of last year (16,742). During this period, there were three consecutive days with more than 3,000 hotspots. A streak with such high data has not happened in September since 2007.
August —the worst fire since 2010— also presented high daily data on fires, according to data from Inpe (National Institute for Space Research). On the 22nd, 3,358 fires were registered in the biome, the highest value for the month of August since 2002.
Satellite images from August 25th also show a concentration of gray clouds over the Amazon region.
And the situation in August could have been even worse. An operation in Mato Grosso prevented a new “fire day”, which was being engineered by landowners in Colniza, one of the cities with the highest number of fires in the country.
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