• MODIS Pic of the Day 16 August 2022

    From Dan Richter@1:317/3 to All on Tue Aug 16 12:00:22 2022
    August 16, 2022 - Six Rivers Lightning Complex Fire

    Six Rivers
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    On August 5, 2022, thunderstorms rolled across the rugged, forested
    mountains of Six Rivers National Forest in Humboldt and Trinity
    Counties, located the northwest corner of California. Multiple
    lightning strikes sparked twelve individual fires in the forests
    located roughly between Redding and Eureka, California. Evacuations of
    multiple at-risk locations began immediately.

    Aggressive firefighting, focused on protecting public safety and full
    suppression, reduced the number of individual fires to eight by August
    6. Although all fires are being handled under the wider name of Six
    Rivers Lightning Complex Fire, the eight individual fires were all
    burning in the Six River National Forest and had the following names:
    Waterman, Cedar, Bremer, Friday, Oak, Charlie, Corral, and Campbell.
    The fires were burning in steep and sometimes nearly inaccessible
    terrain with accumulated dead and downed timber from a winter ice
    storm. A few days later, two more fires had been extinguished, leaving
    only six individual areas within the Complex.

    As of 9:00 p.m. EDT on August 15, the Six Rivers Lightning Complex Fire
    had burned 20,052 Acres to become the second-largest fire in California
    this year. This follows behind the McKinney Fire, which has burned more
    than 60,000 acres in Klamath National Forest, Siskiyou County since
    July 29. According to Inciweb Incident Management System, the Six
    Rivers Lightning Complex Fire was 19 percent contained on August 15,
    with more than 2,000 personnel actively engaged fighting the fires. The
    report stated that a strong inversion kept smoke low to the ground and
    increasing through the morning hours, but in the afternoon northwest
    winds allowed smoke to gradually lift from the northwest end of the
    fire although smoke remained thick on the downwind side.

    The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on board
    NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired a true-color image of the Six Rivers
    Lightning Complex Fires on August 14. Red “hot spots” mark areas where
    the thermal bands on the image detected high temperatures, which in
    this case shows actively burning fire. Thick smoke—most of it so thick
    that it obscures the land from view— covers roughly 5,370 square
    kilometers (2,073 square mi). That’s larger than the state of Delaware.
    A large but much thinner veil of smoke pours southwestward into the
    Central Valley. Meanwhile, a thick bank of fog stretches over Eureka
    and the coastal valleys west of the smoke and fire.

    Image Facts
    Satellite: Aqua
    Date Acquired: 8/14/2022
    Resolutions: 1km (49.6 KB), 500m (158.6 KB), 250m (453.6
    KB)
    Bands Used: 1,4,3
    Image Credit: MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC



    https://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/individual.php?db_date=2022-08-16

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