Wildland Fires Billowing Near Great Bear Lake

In early July 2026, several wildland fires burned in the Sahtu Region of Canada's Northwest Territories near Great Bear Lake. The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument on the NOAA-21 platform acquired this corrected reflectance image of some of the larger fires on July 8, 2026. Use the image slider to toggle between the left and right images to show the locations where VIIRS detected thermal anomalies that usually indicate fire. Note that this image and the others on this page use Worldview's Arctic projection of Earth.

As of July 10, the Environment and Climate Change division of the territorial government was tracking 64 fires in the region that had collectively burned nearly 169,000 hectares (417,000 acres).

This second image includes the VIIRS Deep Blue Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) map layer, which indicates the level to which particles in the air (aerosols) prevent light from traveling through the atmosphere. At ground level, dense aerosol concentrations can be harmful to human health, especially for people with lung conditions.

Aerosols scatter and absorb incoming sunlight, reducing visibility. For an observer on the ground, an AOD of less than 0.1 is “clean” air characteristic of clear blue skies, bright sun, and maximum visibility. At an AOD level greater than 3.0—which is the case in much of this scene—aerosols have become so dense that the Sun is obscured.

This image adds the VIIRS Deep Blue Aerosol Type layer, which provides information related to the aerosol composition over land and ocean. In this layer, reds indicate smoky aerosols. Yellow areas are a mixture of aerosol types, while greens indicate fine particles. Purple indicates high altitude smoke. Wildland fires can sometimes burn so hot that they make their own smoky clouds, known as pyrocumulonimbus (which would be blue on this map), that can inject aerosols much higher into the atmosphere.

The European Union's Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellites acquired a higher resolution view of the fires and burn scars on July 7.

In a report released in 2025, researchers found that the number of wildland fires burning in Arctic regions is on the rise, and these fires are burning larger, hotter, and longer than they did in previous decades.