Fires in the Upper Midwest
GOES-16 (GOES-East) CIMSS Natural Color Red-Green-Blue (RGB), Fire Temperature RGB and Shortwave Infrared (3.9 µm) images (above) revealed a small cluster of fires in southeastern North Dakota, as well as isolated fires in far western Minnesota and far northeastern South Dakota on 01 May 2020. Strong winds — gusting over 30 mph at some locations — in the wake of a frontal passage helped some of these agricultural fires to intensify for a few hours, with pyrocumulus clouds and a smoke plume being produced by the cluster of fires in southeastern North Dakota.GOES-16 derived products such as Fire Power, Fire Temperature and Fire Area (below) allow individual fire pixels to be sampled and characterized — for example, at 2136 UTC.