English: Dozens of fires dot the landscape around southeastern Russia’s Lake Baikal as winter’s snow still drapes over the high elevations of the mountain ranges to the north and east of the lake’s clear blue waters in mid-June 2017. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard NASA’s Terra satellite acquired a true-color image of the scene on June 12.

Each red “hot spot” marks an area where the thermal bands on the instrument detected temperatures higher than background. When accompanied by smoke, as most of those in this image, such hot spots are diagnostic for actively burning fire.

Most of the fires are burning in Irkutsk Oblast, an area that has suffered from heavy fire activity from early spring through summer in the last four years. The winter of 2016-2017 was again relatively hot and dry, and the risk of fire is significant. Some wildfires were reported by mid-April and, according to a story published online by the Global Fire Monitoring Center on April 29, the spread of wildfires across Siberia had prompted authorities to declare a state of emergency.