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GOES-14 SRSO-R: Wildfire in southern Washington

By Scott Bachmeier •

GOES-14 visible (0.63 µm) images [click to play MP4 animation]

GOES-14 visible (0.63 µm) images [click to play MP4 animation]

1-minute interval GOES-14 SRSO-R visible (0.63 µm) images (above; click image to play animation) revealed the pulsing nature of the large Cougar Creek wildfire complex burning in southern Washington (not far southwest of Yakima) on 12 August 2015. The MP4 movie file is also available as a very large (128 Mbyte) animated GIF. The second fire blow-up that began around 1700 UTC apparently produced a pyrocumulonimbus cloud, with cloud-top IR Brightness Temperature (BT) values cooling past -40º C. Large amounts of smoke were transported northward and then northeastward away from the fire source region.

During the preceding overnight hours, a comparison of  1003 UTC Suomi  NPP VIIRS shortwave Infrared (3.74 µm), Day/Night Band (0.8 µm), and Infrared (11.45 µm) images (below) showed a very large shortwave IR fire “hot spot” (yellow to red to black pixels), with the large fire glowing very brightly on the Day/Night Band image; the coldest IR BT value of the cloud streaming northward from the fire was -53º C.

Suomi NPP VIIRS shortwave Infrared (3.74 µm), Day/Night Band (0.8 µm), and Infrared (11.45 µm) images [click to enlarge]

Suomi NPP VIIRS shortwave Infrared (3.74 µm), Day/Night Band (0.8 µm), and Infrared (11.45 µm) images [click to enlarge]

Categories: Fire detection, GOES-14, Suomi NPP, VIIRS