Wildfires

The wildfires in Southern California garnered a lot of media attention this week. Coincidently, my attention was first captured by a CBS 60 Minutes segment, The Age of Mega-Fires, by Scott Pelle this past Sunday evening. Likewise, there was a Sunday New York Times Magazine article, The Future is Drying Up, by Jon Gertner that discusses water issues in the Western U.S.

Those stories lead to a search for online resources that monitor fires. I knew that NASA World Wind had a MODIS layer that visualized fire data and suspected there were KML/KMZ layers available in Google Earth if I could find them. Of course there are, and they are available for the San Diego (*.kmz file) and L.A. (*.kmz file) areas. Additionally, the U.S. Forest Service has maps and a KMZ MODIS file available that produced the images below:

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
Red= active hotspots -- Orange= active> 12< yellow=" active">24 hrs<>

Red= active hotspots -- Orange= active> 12< yellow=" active">24 hrs< 6 days

But I found much more. NOAA has a Real Time Satellite Fire Monitoring system with images updated every 30 minutes. It also has a Significant Event Image of the Day site that was featuring satellite images from GOES 11.

There also is the National Interagency Fire Center that has satellite images in a variety of formats from GOES 10.

Let's not forget NASA. It's Earth Observatory website featured fire satellite images, also.

Then there is NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center whose Ikhana unmanned aircraft system used thermal-infrared imaging sensors to produce the image layers for Google Earth below:

Rice and Mt. Palomar Fires

Harris Fire

Southern California and the Western United States are not the only dry regions facing troubles. In the blog post, Sweatin' the Mediterranean Heat at RealClimate.org, the dry condition of the eastern Mediterranean region, in Turkey specifically, is discussed scientifically.

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