Massive California Warehouse Fire Captured on Satellite
On the afternoon of 11 June, 2026, a fire broke out at a medical supply warehouse in Tracy, California, in the central part of the state. The fire quickly consumed the nearly million square foot facility. While our weather satellites are frequently used to identify and monitor wildfires, they can also do the same for human-built structures as well.
Let’s begin by taking a look at the GOES-19 (GOES West) true color view. This loop runs from 2000-2200 UTC (1 PM – 3 PM local time). The fire is easy to identify from the large plume of thick, black smoke that erupts from the center of the image before being advected southward.
Of course, other spectral bands can show some unique perspectives of the image. Here is the Fire Temperature RGB product. Note the bright red spot in the center of the loop that appears just before the darker smoke plume arises.
As this blog frequently discusses, the 3.9 micron channel is a must-see tool for early identification of fire, and this event is no exception. It’s easy to see the moment the fire erupts thanks to the appearance of a dark (hot) spot at this channel.
These geostationary images are quite useful for fire detection as they are temporally continuous. With geostationary observations at all channels available every 5 minutes over the continental United States, it’s easy to capture the temporal evolution of events. While polar orbiting overpasses are comparatively rarer, they make up their temporal sparseness with much higher spatial resolution. Fortunately, there was an overpass by NOAA-20 as the fire was intensifying.
Courtesy of the CIRA Slider viewer, here is the Fire Temperature RGB Product as seen by the VIIRS overpass at 2040 UTC. Compare this to the fire temperature image above: note how the pixels in VIIRS are both smaller and hotter. The change in fire temperature is a function of how the radiant energy is distributed in the different pixel sizes. At 2 km, the geostationary pixels are capturing plenty of non-burning space and thus the areal average of the radiant energy, while higher than any non-burning pixel, will still be lower than the fire itself.
By contrast, the VIIRS pixels are only 375 m across. If we look at the size of the building in question on Google Maps, we see that it’s about 630 m long, or approximately two VIIRS pixels side by side. The rectangular shape of the building appears to be reflected in the shape of the hot-to-very hot fire pixels above. These pixels are small enough that they are mostly filled with fire, and with little non-fire area to bring down the average, this is marked as “very hot” by the RGB recipe.
While the building is a total loss, fortunately there were no reports of injuries among the workers.