Tropical peatland fires rank among the most dangerous and stubborn fires on Earth. Instead of racing through trees and vegetation, these fires smolder through dried wetland soils and large deposits of peat, often continuing underground at relatively low temperatures. That makes them extremely difficult to extinguish and exceptionally polluting.
By one estimate, peat fires produce three times more fine particulate matter than other tropical forest fires, along with five times more sulfur dioxide, three times more organic carbon, and twice as much methane and carbon monoxide. Satellite Images Reveal Indonesia's Fire Season Indonesia's 2026 fire season was already underway when the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured an image of the region on September 1, 2026. On the annotated map, each red dot represents a "fire detection." This means the satellite sensor and an algorithm identified a pixel containing thermal anomalies associated with fire.
A single fire can produce multiple detections. Peat fires are a persistent problem in Indonesia, which contains about 36 percent of the world's tropical peatlands. During severe droughts, these normally wet landscapes can dry enough to ignite.
Over the past three decades, such conditions have repeatedly produced long-lasting fires that blanket large areas in smoke for weeks and disrupt the lives of millions of people. Wildfires occur in Indonesia every year, but some of the most destructive seasons in recent decades came during El Niño, particularly in 1997 and 2015. NOAA assessed El Niño as present and strengthening in August 2026.
The climate pattern commonly reduces rainfall across Indonesia. The drying can become even more pronounced when El Niño occurs alongside a positive phase of the Indian Ocean Dipole, which was also underway. "Indonesia is only about three weeks into its fire season, but we're seeing fire activity track sharply upward, similar to 2015," said Robert Field, a Columbia University researcher who developed a tool called the Global Fire Weather Database that produces experimental, real-time fire weather forecasts.
"The strong El Niño is making the dry season drier over the fire-prone parts of the country and exacerbating burning -- just as we anticipated it would," he said. The comparison with 2015 is significant. After more than three months of burning that year, Indonesia's fires had emitted 1.75 billion tons of greenhouse gas equivalents -- more than Japan emits in an entire year.
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