Wildfire in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan
A Java animation of GOES-12 (above; upper panels) and GOES-13 (above; lower panels) visible channel and 3.9 µm IR images showed a smoke plume (drifting southeastward) and “hot spots” (black-enhanced IR pixels) associated with a large wildfire that was burning the the eastern portion of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan on 03 August 2007. Note the improvement evident with changes to the image navigation and registration (INR) on the GOES-13 satellite: the coastline features and the fire hot spots remain fairly steady from image to image, compared to the GOES-12 images which exhibit a good deal of “wobble” in the animation.
The smoke plume was clearly depicted on Aqua MODIS true color imagery (below), drifting southeastward across northern Lake Huron. The fire (likely started by lightning on 02 August) was reported to have burned about 5000 acres by late afternoon, and was spreading southeastward at the rate of more than 1 mile per hour through uninhabited marshland north of Newberry, Michigan.
