Kuwait Oil Fires

Information on the hundreds of oil fires which burned in Kuwait during 1991 can be found in a special journal issue :

J. Geophys. Res. 97, No. D13, September 20, 1992. For a bibliography and related links see the references.

Here are some Landsat images of Kuwait during May of 1991:

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  Several fires, and their plumes. Light plumes came from brine layers. The scene is roughly 10 km wide.

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  A single oil fire, and its hot halo several hundred meters across. Most fires produced dark soot plumes, but the hottest fires had no plume, and had core temperatures of roughly 1100 Celcius. These arose from burning methane.

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  An oil lake with an area of about 80 hectares, roughly 1 km in diameter.

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• If you have an MPEG viewer, you can telescope into the above fire (105,115 bytes, 40 frames) or oil lake (113,784 bytes, 40 frames) from a wide-angle view.