File:Fires and smoke in northern Canada (MODIS 2017-08-15).jpg

English: Canada, like so many other places on Earth, is experiencing a very heavy fire season due to hot, dry conditions. As of August 11, 2017, the Northern Territories Environment and Natural Resources forecast high to extreme fire weather for all regions, excluding the Inuvik Region.

On August 10, 2017, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired a true-color image of smoke and fire across northern Canada. The Great Slave Lake can be seen in the northwest and Lake Athabasca lies under a stream of smoke in the center of the image. The Great Slave Lake sits in Northern Territories and Lake Athabasca is shared between Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Red hotspots mark areas where the thermal bands on the MODIS instrument detected high temperatures. Such hotspots, when combined with typical smoke, as in this image, are diagnostic for actively burning fire. While most of the hotspots seen in this image cluster primarily south the Great Slave Lake, thick smoke blankets much of the region to the southeast and appears to be moving generally southward from there. Indeed, the smoke proved to be wide-reaching and extended southward to California and east as far as central Pennsylvania and Maryland on August 10. Northern Texas was also experiencing smoke from the fires in northwestern Canada, according to maps published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(NOAA). According to Wildfire Today, four of the five spots with the worst air quality in the United States on August 10 were located in Washington and Idaho, thanks to the smoke from these fires.