It’s the annual spring “burning off the fields” season in the northern hemisphere, and an enormous plume of smoke is streaming across the Gulf of Mexico today, getting caught up in the frontal system that just pushed through the southeast … you can clearly see the band of smoke just south of Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta …
Many of these fires are visible from geosynchronous orbit and the GOES satellite. Here is an image designed to emphasize temperatures, with fires showing up as bright red pixels (amid the pinker hot ground):
Although burning off fields in the spring is a time honored tradition, research has shown it is bad for soil health (not to mention my sinuses). Leaving the issue of climate change aside, it changes rainfall patterns and has other impacts on local and regional weather and climate. While wild fires are a natural process triggered by lightning, and are an important part of the Earth’s systems that many plants and animals have evolved to survive and even take advantage of, the human induced mass fires are taking the good thing too far. Here’s a UN Environment Program article on the subject (link).