Northern California fires
The 2021 northern California wild fire season is still active. It is difficult to see smoke using the VIIRS SNPP day night band (0.7 micron) at night, but there are visible bright spots of the Caldor Fire near Lake Tahoe. The VIIRS I04 (3.74 micron) band shows bright spots of hot fires in northern California. Names of fires were taken from the CAL FIRE website here.
For smoke forecasts, the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratories Global Systems Division runs the High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) Smoke modeling system, which can be viewed here. Dynamics and physics come from the HRRR experimental model and fire emission information is from real-time satellite observations from VIIRS which is flown aboard NOAA-20 and Suomi-NPP.
