India has been suffering from a heat wave lately: see Heat Wave in India 22 Apr 16, on this blog.
There are now (2 May 16) news reports of many forest fires in Northern India and Nepal. These must have arisen, in part, as a consequence of the prevailing hot and dry conditions of the heat wave.
Evidence of these fires is available from space.
The featured image shows a MODIS analysis of the location of surface fires, these are marked with red dots. The milky white region in the lower right hand quadrant of the picture is, I think, the resulting smoke plume which now covers the region to the south of the Himalaya.
The 5000 ft (850mb) streamlines, taken from the Earth website, back this analysis up by indicating an eastwards movement of air in the middle to lower layers of the atmosphere in this region.
Further analysis of combustion products is also available on MODIS. The white pixels below, coincident with the original white plume, represent relatively high levels of carbon monoxide in the air column.
