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.

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1-minute Mesoscale Domain Sector GOES-19 (GOES-East) Visible and Infrared Window images (above) included time-matched plots of SPC Storm Reports — which showed supercell thunderstorms that produced several tornadoes, hail as large as 2.50″ in diameter and wind gusts as high as 85 mph across parts of northern/central Illinois and far northwestern Indiana on 11 June 2026. Of the 20 confirmed tornadoes so far across the NWS Chicago forecast area, initial storm surveys have found EF3 damage in Streator, Illinois and Kouts, Indiana.

1-minute GOES-19 Visible and Infrared Window images that included plots of GLM Flash Points (below) highlighted the abundant lightning activity associated with these thunderstorms. Surface observations also supported the satellite depiction of a relatively cloud-free cold pool (created by outflow from a decaying convective complex across northeastern Illinois earlier in the day) — and the upscale growth and tornado production of discrete supercell thunderstorms appeared to increase as they moved eastward and interacted with that residual boundary.

Plots of rawinsonde data from Lincoln, Illinois (location) at 1800 UTC and 2100 UTC (below) displayed a marked increase in the atmosphere’s instability and shear parameters during that 3-hour period — and an elevated mixed layer became well-defined. At the surface, Lincoln was located within the warm, moist air that was surging northward toward the aforementioned residual convective outflow boundary.

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1-minute Mesoscale Domain Sector GOES-19 (GOES-East) Visible and Infrared Window images (above) included plots of SPC Storm Reports — which showed thunderstorms that produced hail as large as 3.40″ in diameter and wind gusts up to 73 mph in eastern Colorado on 08 June 2026.

Farther to the southeast and after sunset, 1-minute GOES-19 Infrared Window images with plots of SPC Storm Reports (below) showed thunderstorms that produced wind gusts as high as 113 mph across Kansas.

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1-minute Mesoscale Domain Sector GOES-19 (GOES-East) Visible images (above) and Infrared Window images (below) included time-matched plots of SPC Storm Reports — which showed thunderstorms that produced wind gusts as high as 98 mph, hail as large as 3.75 inches in diameter and isolated tornadoes across parts of Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota and South Dakota from the late afternoon until a few hours after after sunset on 07 June 2026. Widespread overshooting tops were very apparent in the Visible imagery — and initial discrete storms exhibited enhanced-V signatures in the Infrared imagery, before upscale growth resulted in a large Mesoscale Convective System centered over western North Dakota.

Plots of rawinsonde data in the pre-convective environment at Bismarck ND (KBIS) and Rapid City SD (KUNR) are shown below. Of particular significance were the large Downdraft CAPE (DCAPE) values of 1730 J/kg at 0000 UTC and 1569 J/kg at 1800 UTC at Rapid City and Bismarck, respectively — which highlighted the potential for a strong downward transport of air to surface, producing the widespread damaging winds that were seen across the region.

The coldest cloud-top infrared brightness temperatures in the 1-minute GOES-19 Infrared Window images were around -70C — which represented a significant overshoot of the Most Unstable (MU) air parcel’s Equilibrium Level (EL) as depicted in the plots of rawinsonde data.

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