A rash of large wildland fires raged in western Ontario in mid-July 2026, sending thick smoke plumes streaming across several Canadian provinces and more than a dozen American states from the Great Lakes region to the Mid-Atlantic Coast. Tens of millions of people were advised to stay indoors, as air quality in several major population centers ranked among the worst in the world for July 15-16. In some places, smoke was lingering near the ground because of a heat dome that moved east and was causing extreme high temperatures across the Midwest and Northeast.
The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument on the NOAA-20 platform acquired corrected reflectance imagery of the long and widespread smoke plumes on July 16, 2026. Red dots indicate thermal anomalies detected by VIIRS; these typically indicated the presence of active or recently burning fires.
In this wider view from NOAA-20 VIIRS—which includes seams from the edges of several orbital swaths—we see tan, aerosol laden clouds stretching well out into the North Atlantic. On the upper left, partly covered by the Worldview dashboard, we can also see the wildfire in Canada's Northwest Territories, including blazes near Great Bear Lake that are still sending plumes across northern territories and provinces.
The third image shows a level 3 ultraviolet aerosol index, a provisional product from the NASA-funded Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) instrument. The data indicate the level to which particles in the air (aerosols) reflect and prevent sunlight from traveling through the atmosphere. At ground level, such dense aerosol concentrations are harmful to human health, especially for people with lung conditions.
Aerosols scatter and absorb incoming sunlight, reducing visibility. For an observer on the ground, an aerosol index of less than 0.1 is “clean” air characteristic of clear blue skies, bright sun, and maximum visibility. At an aerosol index level greater than 4.0—which is the case in much of this scene—aerosols have become so dense that the Sun is obscured.
This image pair compares the aerosol index from the July 2026 wildfire smoke event with a wildfire smoke event that blanketed eastern states and provinces in June 2023. These data (OMPS_NPP_NMMIEAI_L2) come from the Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS) on the Suomi National Polar orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite. Researchers from NASA's Langley Research Center provided a research summary of the 2023 event.
For updates and the latest alerts on fire-related air quality in the U.S., visit AirNow, a partnership of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Park Service, the Centers for Disease Control, NASA, and tribal, state, and local air quality agencies.
In early July 2026, several wildland fires burned in the Sahtu Region of Canada's Northwest Territories near Great Bear Lake. The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument on the NOAA-21 platform acquired this corrected reflectance image of some of the larger fires on July 8, 2026. Use the image slider to toggle between the left and right images to show the locations where VIIRS detected thermal anomalies that usually indicate fire. Note that this image and the others on this page use Worldview's Arctic projection of Earth.
As of July 10, the Environment and Climate Change division of the territorial government was tracking 64 fires in the region that had collectively burned nearly 169,000 hectares (417,000 acres).
This second image includes the VIIRS Deep Blue Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) map layer, which indicates the level to which particles in the air (aerosols) prevent light from traveling through the atmosphere. At ground level, dense aerosol concentrations can be harmful to human health, especially for people with lung conditions.
Aerosols scatter and absorb incoming sunlight, reducing visibility. For an observer on the ground, an AOD of less than 0.1 is “clean” air characteristic of clear blue skies, bright sun, and maximum visibility. At an AOD level greater than 3.0—which is the case in much of this scene—aerosols have become so dense that the Sun is obscured.
This image adds the VIIRS Deep Blue Aerosol Type layer, which provides information related to the aerosol composition over land and ocean. In this layer, reds indicate smoky aerosols. Yellow areas are a mixture of aerosol types, while greens indicate fine particles. Purple indicates high altitude smoke. Wildland fires can sometimes burn so hot that they make their own smoky clouds, known as pyrocumulonimbus (which would be blue on this map), that can inject aerosols much higher into the atmosphere.
Hot, dry, and windy conditions exacerbated the spread of wildfires across the states of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico in early July 2026. The image above was acquired by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument on the Suomi National Polar orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite on July 1. True-color corrected reflectance data is overlaid with the fires and thermal anomalies layer, where each red dot represents the center of a 375-meter pixel that has been identified as a thermal anomaly (usually fire). In the scene:
The Pocket Fire is burning north of Sedona, Arizona; by the early afternoon of July 2, 20,680 acres had burned and the fire was 21% contained.
The Babylon Fire in Utah began on June 26 and by the afternoon of July 2 had burned 79,795 acres and was 0% contained.
Three large fires are visible in Colorado, all of which were 0% contained on July 2. From west to east, the Ferris Fire began on June 27 due to lightning and has burned 27,382 acres. The Gold Mountain Fire has burned 18,005 acres, and the Aspen Acres Fire has burned 47,953 acres.
The Sacaton Fire in New Mexico started on June 21 due to lightning and has burned 1,279 acres. It was 0% contained on July 2.
All of the fire reports come from the InciWeb interagency all-risk incident information management system.
To find more NASA remote sensing data related to the fires, visit the Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) U.S./Canada web map.
In this second view, true-color data is overlaid with the Deep Blue aerosol layer showing the composition of the airborne particles above the fires. The presence of smoke is indicated by red (near the surface) and purple (high altitude smoke). Swipe the center bar to the left to see the locations of the fires and how they correspond to the areas of smoke.
Little water remained in Arizona's San Carlos reservoir in late June 2026—less than 1% of capacity—due to very limited winter snow and spring runoff from the mountains upstream of the Gila River watershed. At capacity, the reservoir would be one of Arizona's largest lakes.
The natural color images above come from Landsat 8 and 9 and the Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 (HLS) project; they are overlaid with a data product from NASA's Observational Products for End-Users from Remote Sensing Analysis (OPERA). The OPERA Dynamic Surface Water Extent product maps Earth's surface water every few days at a resolution of 30 meters.
The bright blue on the images represents open water as observed on each date. The left image shows the reservoir on July 25, 2023, when the San Carlos reservoir was about 60% full, while the right image shows the same area on June 23, 2026, when the reservoir was 1% full. Swipe the center bar left and right to see the amount of water in the reservoir change between the two dates.
The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) aboard the NOAA-20 platform observed wildfires just west of the Yenisei River in the Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia on June 17, 2026. In the false-color corrected reflectance image above (bands M11-I2-I1), the wildfires appear as patches of dark red (burn scars) ringed in bright red, which marks the active fire front. In this band combination, smoke appears light blue/teal.
Press the "play" button in the lower left corner of the second map to view the growth and progression of the fires from June 12 to 17. The false-color image is overlaid with the thermal anomalies layer, in which each of the red dots represents a fire burning within a 375m pixel. The fires grew from roughly 16,700 hectares (41,300 acres) on June 13 to 62,600 hectares (154,700 acres) by the morning of June 17. The rapid spread of the fires has been attributed by local authorities to high temperatures and an abundance of dead trees due to severe Siberian silkworm infestations.
The Gulf Stream is a strong and historically important ocean current that runs through the Florida Straits, flows along the eastern seaboard of the United States, veers eastwards near 36°N latitude around North Carolina, and subsequently moves towards northwest Europe. This image from June 10, 2026—drawn from the GHRSST Level 4 MUR sea surface temperature analysis product—shows the comparatively warmer surface waters of the stream visible in dark red along the east coast of the US. Its curls and related eddies become more apparent as the current flows into cooler waters in the North Atlantic.
The Kuroshio Current (also known as the Black Current or the Japan Current) flows across the northwestern reaches of the Pacific Ocean. Similar to the Gulf Stream, the Kuroshio is a western boundary current that moves warm equatorial water northward along the western side of an ocean basin. The current is visible in light red along the southern and eastern coast of Japan.
Both the Gulf Stream and the Kuroshio Current play important roles in the weather and climate of the regions, in cyclone formation, in nutrient and sediment transport, and in fisheries.
You can read a popular science approach to western boundary currents, ocean dynamics, and NASA's ECCO model and datasets in Going with the Flow, or watch a short video called An Ocean in Motion on the subject.
Tropical Storm Amanda, the first named storm of the 2026 hurricane season, can be seen forming in the eastern Pacific Ocean on June 3, 2026. This Black Marble nighttime blue/yellow composite (day/night band) image is built with data from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) aboard the NOAA-20 platform.
Due to ocean conditions related to a developing El Niño, the hurricane season in the eastern Pacific Ocean is expected to be busier than normal compared to the Atlantic basin. Historically, the majority of tropical storms that form in the eastern Pacific stay over the ocean and do not make landfall, but a few affect Hawaii, the west coast of Mexico, or the southwestern United States each year.
This visualization, built with data from May 26, 2026, shows global sea surface temperature anomalies through the lens of the Group for High Resolution Sea Surface Temperature (GHRSST) Level 4 sea surface temperature analysis, which compares current measurements with past Multiscale Ultrahigh Resolution (MUR) climatology. Areas in orange and red are warmer than the average for this time of year. Note the warmer than average temperatures in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, indicating possible development of an El Niño event.
El Niño is a natural climate cycle that occurs every two to seven years and lasts nine to twelve months. During such an event, easterly trade winds (which blow from the Americas toward Asia) falter and can even turn around into westerlies, causing the surface waters in central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean to become significantly warmer than usual. Great masses of warm water move from the western Pacific toward the Americas. The change in winds also reduces the upwelling of cooler, nutrient-rich waters from the deep — shutting down or reversing some ocean currents around the equator and along the west coast of South and Central America.
The circulation of air above the tropical Pacific Ocean responds to this redistribution of ocean heat. The typically strong high-pressure systems of the eastern Pacific weaken, changing the balance of atmospheric pressure across the eastern, central, and western Pacific. While easterly winds tend to be dry and steady, Pacific westerlies tend to come in bursts of warmer, moister air. Because of the vastness of the Pacific basin, these wind and humidity changes get transmitted around the world, disrupting circulation patterns such as jet streams.
This image comparison shows sea surface temperature anomalies from May 2025 (on the left) and in May 2026 (on the right). The Pacific was generally "ENSO-neutral" in 2025, with conditions sitting around average between El Niño and La Niña phases.
Recent sea surface height data from the NASA-European Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite — another important tool for measuring the state of the ocean surface — affirms the predictions of a developing El Niño event in 2026. Water expands as it warms, so warmer water masses will raise the height of the sea surface in some places.
California's Santa Rosa island, part of Channel Islands National Park, was closed to public access in mid-May 2026 due to a wildfire on the southeast side of the island. The fire began on May 15 and was likely caused by human activity, according to government and news sources. As of May 21, 2026, the fire had burned 17,554 acres and was 44 percent contained.
Click the play button in the lower left corner of the map to view a time-lapse animation of the spread of the wildfire from May 15-20. The images were made from false-color corrected reflectance data acquired by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) aboard the NOAA-21 platform. The burned area and fire front appears red and orange, with unburned vegetation in green.
Autumn leaf color spread across the southern Andes of Chile in early May 2026. The Multispectral Imager (MSI) aboard the European Space Agency's Sentinel-2C platform acquired this true color reflectance (nadir BRDF-adjusted) image of the region on May 9. The Lonquimay volcano, visible on the right, was covered in snow from a recent storm and contrasted with the red and yellow fall colors to the west.
The comparison above shows March 8 on the left and May 9 on the right. Swipe the center bar left and right to see the late summer greens give way to autumnal reds, yellows, browns, and oranges.
The images come from the Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) project, which provides 30-meter resolution, true-color surface reflectance imagery from the OLI and OLI-2 instruments aboard Landsat 8 and 9 and from MSI aboard ESA's Sentinel-2 satellites. Data from the four instruments are processed through a set of algorithms to make the imagery consistent and comparable. This processing includes atmospheric correction, cloud and cloud-shadow masking, spatial co-registration and common gridding, illumination and view angle normalization, and spectral bandpass adjustment.