12 years of fires on one map

IDV Solutions compiled data from the Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite to make this map showing heat produced by fires between 2001 and July 13, 2012 in the United States.  A high resolution version of the map can be found HERE.

IDV Solutions describes the map:

Each dot represents a moment of pretty extreme heat, down to the one square kilometer level (I only retained fires greater than 100KW MW and of those only fires that the system was more than 50% confident of). They’ve been colored and scaled by “units” of the typical American nuclear power plant’s summertime capacity to provide some sort of baseline of the fires’ magnitude.

There are a couple temporal charts in there, too. The seasonal curve I would expect, but the overall upwards trend was interesting (and 2012 is only half through). Is it related to a lag-offset El Niño or La Niña effect?

Author: Bill Gabbert

After working full time in wildland fire for 33 years, he continues to learn, and strives to be a Student of Fire. View all posts by Bill Gabbert