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Grassland fire in North Dakota

By Scott Bachmeier •

GOES-16 Fire Temperature RGB images [click to play animated GIF | MP4]

GOES-16 (GOES-East) Fire Tempera ture RGB images (above) showed the rapid north-northwestward spread of a wind-driven grassland fire across Sioux County in far southern North Dakota during the early afternoon hours on 21 August 2022. South-southeasterly winds were gusting to 17-18 knots (19-21 mph) at surrounding METAR sites during that time period.

The GOES-16 Fire Temperature RGB image at 1921 UTC (below) includes cursor readouts of the individual RGB components, along with the corresponding Fire Detection and Characterization Algorithm (FDCA) products. This was the time of the peak 3.9 µm infrared brightness temperature of 86.95ºC — the FDCA Fire Temperature value was 758.57 K, while the Fire Power was 912.46 MW.

GOES-16 Fire Temperature RGB image at 1921 UTC, with cursor readouts of RGB components and Fire Detection and Characterization Algorithm products [click to enlarge]

In Suomi-NPP VIIRS True Color and False Color RGB images valid at 1938 UTC viewed using RealEarth (below), the elongated dark vegetation burn scar was evident, along with a smoke plume fanning out to the north and a lone pyrocumulus cloud just northeast of the active fire (brighter shades of pink in the False Color image).

Suomi-NPP VIIRS True Color and False Color RGB images, valid at 1938 UTC [click to enlarge]

Categories: Fire detection, GOES-16, Level 2 Product Readouts, RealEarth, Red-Green-Blue (RGB) images, Suomi NPP, VIIRS