A View from Space

This satellite picture was taken at 18:50 UTC on June 23 by NASA's Terra Earth observing satellite. The pixel resolution on this picture is 250 meters. The Terra satellite and other NASA satellites monitor the atmosphere for carbon monoxide and other pollutants. This picture shows the wildfires burning here in Arizona. Terra has been used for the past several years to monitor wildfires all around the world. The instruments on Terra are sensitive enough to allow analysts to be "able to tell the difference between pollutants originating from wildfires and those from urban and industrial sources."

The white fluffy things on the right are obviously clouds, but the gray smears to the south of the white clouds along the center right hand side of the picture are smoke trails from the wildfires. The gray smudge below the smoke trails is Phoenix. That's the Gulf of Baja at the bottom of the picture and the dark kidney bean shaped object towards the left is the Salton Sea. Of course, that's the Pacific coast of Southern California looking overcast all the way to the left.

If you are able to zoom in with your browser, you can see the red outlines drawn in by NASA showing where the wildfires are located. I'm not surprised at the number of fires. We had a relatively wet winter and spring was really beautiful here in the desert with all of the wild flowers. But, it has been over a hundred every day for the last couple of weeks and everything had dried up for the summer. The last couple of nights there have been lightning flashing in the sky all around and so there is bound to be fire. We even got a little rain last night which might signal the start of monsoon season.