{"id":677,"date":"2008-06-30T23:59:46","date_gmt":"2008-06-30T23:59:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/archives\/677"},"modified":"2008-07-03T02:54:21","modified_gmt":"2008-07-03T02:54:21","slug":"fire-activity-in-canada","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/archives\/677","title":{"rendered":"Fire activity in Canada"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"GOES-11<\/a><\/p>\n

Wildfire activity began to increase across the northern portions of Saskatchewan and Manitoba in Canada on 30 June 2008<\/strong><\/a>. GOES-11 visible and 3.9 \u00c2\u00b5m “shortwave IR” images (above)<\/strong><\/em> showed a number of thick smoke plumes (lighter gray features on the visible images)<\/em> drifting southeastward from a large cluster of active fire “hot spots” (darker black pixels on the IR images)<\/em>. GOES-11 was placed into Rapid Scan Operations (RSO) during the afternoon hours, so images near the end of the animation were available at 5-7 minute intervals.<\/p>\n

The largest fire was located between Pelican Narrows and Sandy Bay in Saskatchewan, as seen in an AVHRR false color image (below, <\/strong>viewed using Google Earth<\/a>)<\/strong><\/em>. A close-up view<\/strong><\/a> reveals that the fire had actually jumped the only road that was in that area (the seasonal road which connects Sandy Bay and Pelican Narrows)<\/em>. The GOES-11 shortwave IR brightness temperatures associated with this particular fire were as high as 341\u00c2\u00ba K <\/strong>(68\u00c2\u00ba C, 158\u00c2\u00ba F)<\/strong>,<\/em> which is the saturation temperature of the 3.9 \u00c2\u00b5m detectors on the GOES-11 satellite. Note that some small pyrocumulus clouds could be seen developing over this large and very hot fire on the GOES-11 visible imagery (above)<\/strong><\/em> as well as on the AVHRR false color image (below)<\/strong><\/em>.
\n\"AVHRR<\/a><\/p>\n

A closer view of the largest fire using AWIPS images of the 1-km resolution MODIS 3.7 \u00c2\u00b5m and the 4-km resolution GOES-12 3.9 \u00c2\u00b5m IR channels (below)<\/strong><\/em> shows the advantage of higher spatial resolution for displaying the shape and coverage of not only the largest fire cluster (located near the center of the image),<\/em> but also the smaller fires in outlying areas. Many of the pixels were so hot that the IR brightness temperatures exceeded the 54.5\u00c2\u00ba C<\/strong> upper threshold for AWIPS display, and showed up as black pixels (registered as “NO DATA<\/strong>“) on the imagery. The smoke from this fire was restricting surface visibility to 1 mile at Flin Flon (CYFO)<\/strong> and 3 miles at The Pas (CYQD)<\/strong> in Manitoba, even though those 2 sites were not in the direct path of the thickest portion of the smoke plume.<\/p>\n

\"MODIS<\/a><\/p>\n

Some clues as to the locations of the hottest<\/em> portion of the fire — which happened to be located within the eastern half<\/em> of the active fire area, where the black “NO DATA” pixels were seen on the MODIS shortwave IR image — could be found by examining other MODIS images and products: note the darker black pixels<\/em> on the 11.0 \u00c2\u00b5m “IR Window” channel, the brighter white pixels<\/em> on the 2.1 \u00c2\u00b5m near-IR “Snow\/Ice” channel, and the darker red pixels<\/em> on the Land Surface Temperature (LST) product (below)<\/em>. AWIPS cursor sampling indicated that the hottest pixel on the IR Window image was 52\u00c2\u00ba C<\/strong> (126\u00c2\u00ba F)<\/em><\/strong>, while the hottest pixel on the LST image was significantly warmer at 145\u00c2\u00ba F (63\u00c2\u00ba C)<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\"MODIS<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wildfire activity began to increase across the northern portions of Saskatchewan and Manitoba in Canada on 30 June 2008. GOES-11 visible and 3.9 \u00c2\u00b5m “shortwave IR” images (above) showed a number of thick smoke plumes (lighter gray features on the visible images) drifting southeastward from a large cluster of active fire “hot spots” (darker black […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,22,6,18,32,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-air-quality","category-avhrr","category-fire-detection","category-goes-11","category-google-earth","category-modis"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cimss.ssec.wisc.edu\/satellite-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}