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Thermal signature of missile strikes at Shayrat Air Base in Syria

By Scott Bachmeier •

EUMETSAT Meteosat-10 Shortwave Infrared (3.9 µm) images, with hourly surface reports; Shayrat Air Base is located at the center of the cyan circle [click to play animation]

EUMETSAT Meteosat-10 Shortwave Infrared (3.9 µm) images, with hourly surface reports; Shayrat Air Base is located at the center of the cyan circle [click to play animation]

EUMETSAT Meteosat-10 Shortwave Infrared (3.9 µm) images (above) showed the thermal signature or “hot spot” (darker black pixels) of fires resulting from US missile strikes at Syria’s Shayrat Air Base on 07 April 2017. The warmest infrared brightness temperature was 300.22 K on the 0030 UTC image (the SEVIRI instrument was scanning the Shayrat region at 00:40 UTC), which was about 25 K warmer than the surrounding background temperatures; though the fires were much smaller than the nominal 3 km spatial resolution of the 3.9 µm detector, the sub-pixel effect enables a signal of the fire radiative power to be registered.

A toggle between the 0015 and 0030 UTC images displayed using McIDAS-V (below; courtesy of William Straka, SSEC) highlights the appearance of the thermal signature at Shayrat Air Base. Two persistent hot spots located northeast of Palmyra could have been due to refinery or mining activities.

EUMETSAT Meteosat-10 Shortwave Infrared (3.9 µm) images at 0015 and 0030 UTC [click to enlarge]

EUMETSAT Meteosat-10 Shortwave Infrared (3.9 µm) images at 0015 and 0030 UTC [click to enlarge]

Categories: Fire detection, McIDAS-V, Meteosat