NASA Images Show Peat Fires Darkening Indonesia as 2026 Haze Season Begins

NASA said new satellite imagery shows peatland fires already darkening skies over Indonesia at the start of the 2026 fire season, as drought-fueled smoke spreads across populated areas and disrupts schools, flights and daily life.

In an Image of the Day published Thursday, NASA Earth Observatory used imagery from the MODIS instrument on NASA’s Aqua satellite, captured Sept. 1, to show thick smoke over parts of Sumatra and Borneo. The agency said the fires are flaring amid severe dry conditions. NASA cited BMKG, Indonesia’s meteorology agency, as reporting that about 90% of the country received little to no rainfall in early August; BMKG’s own analysis put the share of areas with low rainfall at about 90.79%. Indonesia’s Environment and Forestry Ministry, known as KLHK, said its SiPongi monitoring system recorded 946 high-confidence hotspots nationwide through Aug. 30 at 21:02 WIB.

What makes the fires especially dangerous is that many are burning in peatlands, the carbon-rich wetlands that underlie large parts of Indonesia. Peat fires can burn above ground in vegetation and also smolder underground for long periods, making them much harder to extinguish than typical forest fires. Indonesia holds roughly 36% of the world’s tropical peatlands, according to NASA’s background, raising the stakes for both public health and climate emissions. “Surface fires are less of a concern, but when fires get underground, they just won’t stop,” Robert Field of Columbia University said in NASA’s report.

NASA and Indonesian agencies said the visible hotspots do not tell the full story. Satellite hotspot counts can undercount fires during the worst haze because MODIS and the VIIRS instruments may miss flames when smoke is very thick, when fires are burning below the forest canopy, or when peat is smoldering underground. In other words, the most hazardous smoke episodes can also be the hardest to track from space.

That matters because this year is already drawing comparisons with Indonesia’s 2015 fire disaster, the benchmark for the region’s worst haze crisis. NASA said the 2015 fires released an estimated 1.75 billion tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent. As of NASA’s Sept. 2 update, the 2026 fires had already released roughly 10% of that total after about a month of burning. NASA also said Indonesian officials warned that large parts of the population were exposed to hazardous smoke, with some schools shifting to remote learning, several national parks temporarily closed and some flights delayed because of heavy haze.

The smoke is not just a domestic problem. The ASEAN Specialised Meteorological Centre, which monitors regional haze, raised alerts in late August and set Alert Level 3 for the southern ASEAN region. It reported dense smoke plumes from Kalimantan and Sumatra and warned of a risk of transboundary haze affecting neighboring countries.

Indonesian authorities have stepped up response measures, including ground firefighting, aerial water-bombing, cloud-seeding and other weather-modification efforts, helicopter deployments, field verification and enforcement actions tied to suspected fire cases. But peat fires are notoriously persistent, and the latest NASA imagery suggests the season is already shaping into a major early test for Indonesia and the wider region.