Wildfire near Lake Okeechobee in Florida
Hot spots on GOES-12 3.9µm and MODIS 3.7µm IR imagery (above) indicated the presence of several wildfires near the northwestern shoreline of Lake Okeechobee in southern Florida on 30 May 2007. The fires were hot enough to saturate the shortwave IR detectors on GOES-12, causing the hottest brightness temperatures (normally appearing as black pixels) to “roll over” and show up as “cold” (white) pixels. An Aqua MODIS true color image (below) showed a smoke plume extending westward from the fires, with the smoke reaching the Gulf Coast of Florida. That region continued to experience extreme drought conditions — in fact, the water levels for the lake set an all time record low (note how much the lake water had receded from the southern, western, and northwestern portion of Okeechobee in the MODIS true color image).
