Many fires can be seen burning across Angola, mostly in areas of grass or cropland. The location, widespread nature, and number of fires suggest that these fires were deliberately set to manage land – a strategy often used by farmers to return nutrients to the soil and clear the ground of undesired plants. Although this type of field clearing is the easiest and most cost effective for the farmer, helping enhance crops and grasses for pasture, the fires also have negative effects: smoke that degrades air quality.
Hundreds of fires can be seen burning in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (left) and Tanzania (right), west and east of Lake Tanganyika. Such blazes are set every year during the dry season in Central Africa. Residents burn away scrub and brush annually in the woody savanna to clear land for farming and grazing.
A plume of smoke from a wildfire burning in the wooded foothills of the Sierra Nevada, east of California’s Great Central Valley, can be seen just to the right of the center of this image. The smoke from the fire is blowing towards the south-southeast, trailing over the valley.
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