As is often the case in the winter, a thick river of haze hovered over the Indo-Gangetic Plain in January 2013, casting a gray pall over northern India and Bangladesh. On January 10, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image of haze hugging the Himalayas and spilling out into the Ganges delta and Bengal Sea.
The haze likely resulted from a combination of urban and industrial pollution, agricultural fires, and a regional meteorological phenomenon known as a temperature inversion. Usually the air higher in the atmosphere is cooler than the air near the surface, a situation that allows warm air to rise and disperse pollutants. However, cold air often settles over northern India in the winter, trapping warmer air—and pollution—close to the surface, where it has the greatest impact on human health.
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Earth Observatory, February 2013