The [Olympics] Year the Rain Forest Burned

This month, hundreds of millions worldwide had their TV eyes tuned to the Olympics. But this season might be remembered not solely for the gold medal count but for foreboding events now unfolding just a thousand miles northwest of the Rio games.

With a camera on a NASA satellite that circles over Earth’s poles, University of California, Irvine professor James Randerson has spotted a near-record number of early-dry season fires burning on the southern and western perimeter of the Amazon forest, including in seven Brazilian states and swaths of lowland Peru and Bolivia.

Randerson, a biologist, has created a computer model for forecasting forest fires. Evidence from various satellites indicate that the rainy season just ended shed unusually little precipitation. “It’s the driest we’ve observed in the last 15 years at the onset of the dry season,” he says. Several weeks ago, he forecast a chart-busting conflagration later this month. The many blazes already detected appear to bear out his prediction.

Read the Yale Climate Connections story - “The [Olympics] Year the Rain Forest Burned.”