Fires in Northern Canada

Caught up in high-level winds, smoke from fires in Alaska and northern Canada has spread as far south as the Gulf of Mexico in late July 2004. In this image, the gray-colored plume of smoke flows south and east across central Canada and reaches down toward the Great Lakes (bottom right corner of image). Hudson Bay is at top right, and Lake Winnipeg (right) and Lake Manitoba (left) are roughly in the center. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASAs Aqua satellite captured this image on July 26, 2004. The high-resolution image is a mosaic of data from the MODIS sensors on both Terra and Aqua.

Northern Canada, colloquially the North, is the vast northernmost region of Canada variously defined by geography and politics. Politically, the term refers to three territories of Canada: Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut. Similarly, the Far North (when contrasted to the North) may refer to the Canadian Arctic: the portion of Canada that lies north of the Arctic Circle, east of Alaska and west of Greenland. This area covers about 39% of Canada’s total land area, but has less than 1% of Canada’s population.
These reckonings somewhat depend on the arbitrary concept of nordicity, a measure of so-called “northernness” that other Arctic territories share. Canada is the northernmost country in the Americas (excluding the neighbouring Danish Arctic territory of Greenland which extends slightly further north) and roughly 80% of its 35 million residents are concentrated along its southern border with the United States.

Credit: Image by Jesse Allen, based on data from the MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA-GSFC