Pyrocumulonibus cloud rises up from Canadian wildfires
The Northern Territories in Canada is experiencing one of its worst fire seasons in history. As of this date, there have been 344 wildfires that have burned 2,830,907 hectares of land (close to 7 million acres). The area around the Great Slave Lake, Yellowknife, Ft. Smith, and the Buffalo Lake have been plagued with uncontrolled fires all season long. This natural-color image collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard the Aqua satellite on August 05, 2014 shows a pyrocumulonimbus cloud erupting from the fire north of Buffalo Lake. It is a rare sight to see on satellite imagery. While fire clouds occur with some regularity, it's rare for Aqua to capture images of such mature pyrocumulus clouds. Because of their orbits, Terra always crosses the equator in the morning and Aqua always crosses in the early afternoon (local time). Since pyrocumulus clouds are most developed in the late...