The Alps

Credit: Jacques Descloitres; MODIS team; NASA, Posted on: Monday, 21 February 2005, 07:11 CST Download full size image

Snow marches across the Alps and southern Europe, highlighting smog in Italy's Po River valley, as shown in this true-color Aqua MODIS image from February 9, 2005. The Alps, the crescent-shaped mountain range running from the center to the right side of the image, span a length of 750 miles and cover and area of 80,000 square miles. Their huge presence affects air circulation patterns in the region, causing the aerosols produced by cities like Milan and regions like Lombardy to get stuck in the valley for days at a time. Underneath the grey areosols, MODIS detected a single heat anomaly (marked in red). The anomaly is likely a fire, though the source is not known.

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