File:Aerosols Along the Kirthar Mountains (MODIS).jpg

English: The eastern slopes of Pakistan’s Kirthar Mountains served as a formidable boundary to a blanket of thick haze covering the Indus River Valley in mid-November 2022. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this stunning true-color image of the scene on November 10.

The rugged Kirthar Mountains are made up of a series of parallel rock hill ridges that rise as high as 8,000 feet (2,400 km). They form a tall barrier between the Indus Plain (east) and the province of Balochistan. When haze spreads over the Indus Plain—as it often does this time of year—it rarely rises over the mountains, but can accumulate against the rocky ridges in the lower elevations

Haze is common at this time of year when farmers in northeastern Pakistan and northwestern India set fires to clear their fields of end-of-crop-year stubble and prepare fields for new planting. Haze also becomes more intense in the fall as cooling temperatures require additional heating, increasing urban and industrial pollution. Cooling temperatures also bring air inversions, which can trap aerosol pollutants close to the ground.