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California fire maps2/19/2024 A loss of vegetation on hillsides can put an area at risk of mudslides during rainstorms. "Accurately measuring the burn scar extent is important to assessing the long-term effects of fire damage. "The instrument's radar signals bounce off vegetation in a different way than they do bare, freshly burned ground," NASA said in the statement. It is commonly used to detect ground changes over specific areas, such as earthquake faults, and is being repurposed in this effort to look for burn scars. The instrument flies underneath a C-20A aircraft that is usually based at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center near Palmdale, California. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California is flying its Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) instrument over various fires in Monterey, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Sonoma, Napa, Solano and Lake counties. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC)ĭrones and airplanes are also monitoring the fire's spread. This screenshot shows an interactive 3D visualization that allows you to explore the height of smoke plumes from the California fires, using data from Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) instrument on NASA's Terra satellite. Related: Why is wildfire smoke so bad for your lungs? "Airborne smoke particles can increase the risk of cardiovascular and respiratory disease when inhaled, so tracking their spread provides valuable information for local public health officials." "The smoke plumes generated by the California fires have traveled across vast swaths of western North America in recent weeks, affecting air quality and visibility," NASA said in the statement. This map was created by Liz Anderson, Emily Zentner, Veronika Nagy, Chris Hagan, Renee Thompson, Katy Kidwell and Helga Salinas.Two other Terra instruments are assisting with the effort, too: the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) that monitors smoke and heat in visible, near-infrared and thermal-infrared wavelengths, and the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) that is looking at how high and far smoke particles travel.Īlso keeping an eye on the wildfires are the Suomi-NPP satellite (operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA) and the CALIPSO satellite (a joint mission between NASA and the French national space agency, CNES). Fire namesĬapRadio changed the names of three fires on this map that included a racial slur in accordance with Associated Press guidelines and our own standards. Fires may be missing altogether or have missing or incorrect attribute data. As of September 2020, Cal Fire had found that the dataset is missing 483 notable fires and is looking to find and add these. However, the data is by nature incomplete and duplicates may exist. Ten acres is the federal minimum for reporting.Ĭal Fire says that this dataset - which runs from 1878 to 2020 as of April 2021 and is updated annually - is one of the most complete datasets of California’s fires through history. Cal Fire’s data includes timber fires that burned more than 10 acres, brush fires that burned more than 50 acres and grass fires that burned more than 300 acres, so some smaller fires may not be shown here. Some fires may be missing because historical records were lost or damaged, were too small for the minimum cutoffs, had inadequate documentation or have not yet been incorporated into the database. This means that the causes shown for some fires may be out of date. Cal Fire enters the cause of each year’s fires when this data is captured annually and does not update them if investigations are later completed or determinations are changed. Fire causesĪlso displayed here are the reported cause and acres of each fire shown. These fires are also categorized by the meteorological season in which they started, which are as follows: Winter (December - February), Spring (March - May), Summer (June - August) and Fall (September - November). 2020 is also shown separately because there has been only one recorded fire year so far in the 2020s decade in this dataset. Fires that started between 18 are shown separately here due to more inconsistencies in data for earlier fires. 77 fires that did not include a year in the data have been left out. These wildfires are categorized by the decade or time period in which they started. This map and data is not intended to be used for legal purposes or statistical analysis. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. This map shows the perimeters of more than 20,000 wildfires that have been recorded in California from 1878 to 2020 using data from Cal Fire, the National Parks Service, the U.S.
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