Fires in South East Asia

NASA Modis image of fire pixels all over Cambodia

This week NASA´s Earth Observatory used an shocking image of fire pixels in Southeast Asia. The image was captured by the Modis Sensor used both in Aqua and Terra satellites. I fowarded the image to some friends at Climate Change Media Partnership and got interesting feedbacks. Navin Khadka, from BBC Nepali Service, wants to see if such a thing was also happening at the Hindu Kush Himalayan range. I fowarded some images that I could find at the Modis Rapid Fire Subsets website.

Then Hilary Chiew, reporter from The Star, in Malaisya, decided to contact some sources in Cambodia to check if the information that honey gatherers were really responsible for fires as NASA has stated on their image explanation. But their sources, remembered that there is no evidence that honey collection could cause large forest fires.

Well, the thing I would like to highlight here is that joining the image with some good questions we can build some interesting stories.

Using Modis Subsets

One of the best ways of doing geojournalism is to use the images of MODIS Subsets (http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets/). I know some people, with GIS background, might raise some caveats about the resolution of the images, but the information available is just amazing.

Distribution of NASA´s Modis subsets

By clicking in one of these red squares you can find almost everyday images of everysingle part of the planet. Even better you can ask to see the fire pixels on the image.

And more, as we journalists are not the experts in GIS, the Subsets images can be automaticaly overlayed on Google Earth. Just click on the “Download KMZ file to Google Earth” and you can place yourself on the map. I mean then you can find what the satellite image is telling us about.

This is specialy good for monitoring forest fires. On a previous http://geojournalism.wordpress.com/2008/11/30/monitoring-a-protected-area/ I have just show you how to find shapes of protected areas. If you cross this shapes and the Modis images, you can really built a new content for you readers. You do not even need to be a GIS expert!