Page 135 - GIS for Science, Volume 3 Preview

WILDFIRES
Each year, fires ravage millions of acres of land, destroying thousands of homes and properties around the world. In 2020, California experienced its single greatest wildfire season in its recorded history. The LNU Lightning Complex fires burned across a wide area of Northern California—Lake, Napa, Sonoma, Solano, and Yolo Counties—in the late summer and fall of 2020. That year, wildfires across California destroyed more than 10,000 structures and caused more than $12 billion in damage and firefighting costs.
The magnitude of physical devastation and financial reverberation requires careful study of the event and its aftermath. NASA is uniquely positioned to supply emergency management authorities near real-time situational and long-term environmental impact data to the legions of land planners, land management agencies, and private sector professionals dealing with the fallout.
Studying the relationships between environmental factors and fires can minimize risk. Many of NASA’s Earth-observing instruments contribute to our understanding of fire in the Earth system. NASA’s satellite instruments, which are often the first to detect remote wildfires, automatically send their locations to land managers worldwide within hours.
NASA instruments detect actively burning fires, track the movement of smoke, provide current information to fire managers, and map changes post-event to ecosystems, capturing the extent and severity of burn scars.
The Hennessey and Spanish Fires burn toward Lake Berryessa in Napa County on August 18, 2020.
This false color image captured by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument shows the burn scar from the LNU Lightning Complex fires in Northern California. Shades of red depict healthy vegetation while shades of black show burned areas. Little healthy vegetation remained within the burn scar, which can negatively impact forest connectivity.
Mapping Extreme Events from Space 123
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