1. Monitoring the Growing Big Sur “Pfeiffer” Wildfire at Night
S.F.
S.F.
L.A.
L.A.
The Naval Research Laboratory in Monterey, CA maintains and operates “NexSat”, a public web-based all-purpose weather satellite website that monitors weather on a global scale. [ NexSat processes data from over 30 geostationary and polar orbiting satellite sensors and displays state of the art image products. In this example, NexSat features the Suomi National Polar Orbiting Partnership’s Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite Day Night Band (VIIRS-DNB) sensor over the western US region under moonlit nighttime conditions. the VIIRS-DNB is capable of detecting emissions from bright energy sources such as the San Francisco and Los Angeles Metropolitan areas (solid yellow regions). Under a fairly full moonlit conditions, such as in these scenes, low clouds appear in faint yellow shades while the higher clouds appear light blue.
The feature of interest is the Pfieffer wildfire along the Big Sur coast [see insets], that emits its own bright light during night time conditions, and has grown from ~500 acres during the morning of 12/16 to ~750 acres a day later. NexSat developers are at the forefront of satellite image processing, and are currently developing additional products for fire monitoring during both day and night viewing.
Acknowledgments: Naval Research Laboratory, Marine Meteorology Division
Jeremy Solbrig, Kim Richardson, Mindy Surratt, Arunas Kuciauskas, Rich Bankert, Jeff Hawkins, and our contractors:
Steve Miller (Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA)), and John Kent (Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC))
fire source
fire source