Severe drought linked to the 2026 El Niño is drying out the central and eastern Amazon, and NASA satellites have recorded a sharp rise in fires and smoke there since September 2026, from the forests around Manaus and Santarém east toward the mouth of the Amazon River. On October 12, smoke engulfed Manaus, where fine-particle (PM2.5) pollution topped 135 micrograms per cubic meter and schools and public events were shut down.
NASA Goddard scientist Douglas Morton describes it as a “cascade” of tropical fires that follows El Niño’s rainfall shifts: peat fires in Indonesia first, then the Amazon. His team expects fire activity to move north into Roraima, Amapá, Venezuela, Guyana, and Suriname in November and December 2026, and fire danger in the southern Amazon to peak around August and September 2027. Many of the forests now burning also burned during the 2015 and 2023 El Niño events.
Image: “Fires Arrive in the Amazon Rainforest,” NASA Earth Observatory, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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