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Camp House and Jenkins Creek wildfires in northeast Minnesota

By Scott Bachmeier •

1-minute GOES-19 GeoColor RGB images with an overlay of NGFS fire detection polygons, from 1200-2200 UTC on 12 May [click to play MP4 animation]

1-minute Mesoscale Domain Sector GOES-19 (GOES-East) GeoColor RGB images with an overlay of Next Generation Fire System fire detection polygons (above) displayed the thermal anomalies and dense smoke plumes associated with the Camp House Fire (near Brimson) and Jenkins Creek Fire (near Fairbanks) in northeastern Minnesota on 12 May 2025. These 2 wildfires prompted the issuance of a few evacuation orders.

Thick smoke drifted northeastward across the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and crossed the Canadian border — GOES-19 Aerosol Optical Depth values with these smoke plumes were as high as 1.0 (below).

1-minute GOES-19 Aerosol Optical Depth derived product [click to play MP4 animation]

A NGFS probe of the Jenkins Creek Fire at 2120 UTC on 12 May (below showed various parameters of the thermal anomaly at that time.

NGFS probe of the Jenkins Creek Fire at 2120 UTC on 12 May [click to enlarge]

The Camp House Fire began on the previous day, and had continued burning through the subsequent nighttime hours — its nocturnal glow was evident in a NOAA-21 VIIRS Day/Night Band image at 0831 UTC (3:31 AM local time), just northeast of Brimson (below).

NOAA-21 (mislabeled as NPP) VIIRS Day/Night Band (0.7 µm) image valid at 0831 UTC on 12 May [click to enlarge]

1-minute GOES-19 Visible images with an overlay of the Fire Detection and Characterization Algorithm (FDCA) Fire Mask derived product (below) also showed the thermal signatures and smoke plumes of the 2 larger wildfires (along with a 3rd, smaller wildfire that began to the southwest at 1953 UTC near Shaw). South-southwest winds were gusting to 20-25 knots (23-29 mph) across the region, contributing to the extreme fire behavior.

1-minute GOES-19 Visible (0.64 µm) images with an overlay of the Fire Mask derived product, from 1301-2300 UTC on 12 May [click to play MP4 animation]

An overpass of Landsat-8 provided a 30-meter resolution image of the Jenkins Creek and Camp House wildfires at 1657 UTC (11:57 AM local time) on 12 May, as viewed using RealEarth (below). The active fires appeared as brighter shades of pink, with their hazy smoke plumes extending northward.

Landsat-8 “Natural Color” RGB image at 1657 UTC on 12 May [click to enlarge]

Categories: Fire detection, GOES-19, Landsat, NGFS, NOAA-21, RealEarth, Red-Green-Blue (RGB) images, VIIRS