NASA’s MISR Sees California Wildfire Smoke Plumes Traveling Miles Into the Atmosphere

NASA MISR Instrument Northern California Smoke Plumes — NASA’s MISR instrument captured smoke plumes from five fires burning in northern California. The highest plume reached about 19,685 feet (6,000 meters) in altitude. Credit: NASA/GSFC/LaRC/JPL-Caltech, MISR Team

Smoke from several large wildfires burning in Northern California can be seen traveling miles into the atmosphere.

As of August 24, wildfires in Northern California – including the McCash, Antelope, River Complex, Monument, and Dixie fires – have scorched more than 1 million acres (4,050 square kilometers) of land. The Dixie Fire, the state’s second largest in history, accounts for 731,310 acres (2,959 square kilometers). On August 18, NASA’s Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) instrument, aboard the Terra satellite, acquired new data showing smoke from these fires.

The MISR instrument has nine cameras that view Earth at different angles. The right side of the image shows smoke from the five fires as observed by MISR’s nadir (downward-pointing) camera. The multi-angular information from MISR’s images is used to calculate the height of the smoke plumes. The results of those calculations are shown in the left side of the image. Smoke from areas in red reached an altitude of around 9,840 feet (3,000 meters). The highest plume near the active fires reached approximately 19,685 feet (6,000 meters). In general, higher-altitude plumes transport smoke greater distances from the source, impacting communities downwind. In recent weeks, smoke from fires in the Western U.S. and Canada has impacted much of the East Coast.

The smoke plume height calculation was performed using the publicly available MISR INteractive eXplorer (MINX) software tool. The MISR Plume Height Project maintains a database of global smoke plume heights, accessible here.

MISR was built and is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Southern California, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Terra spacecraft is managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The MISR data were obtained from the NASA Langley Research Center Atmospheric Science Data Center in Hampton, Virginia. JPL is a division of Caltech in Pasadena.

Never miss a breakthrough: Join the SciTechDaily newsletter.
Follow us on Google and Google News.

NASA’s MISR Sees California Wildfire Smoke Plumes Traveling Miles Into the Atmosphere

NASA Takes Flight to Study California’s Wildfire Damage With Smoke-Penetrating Technology

NASA Monitors Atmospheric Carbon Monoxide From California Wildfires

NASA Tracks California’s Wildfires From Space and in the Air

NASA/NOAA Satellites Observe Surprisingly Rapid Increase in Scale and Intensity of Fires in Siberia

NASA’s Terra Satellite Sees Arizona’s Massive Bighorn Fire Burn Scar From Space

NASA: Amazon Fires Were Fueled by Drought-Stressed Forest

NASA’s Terra Satellite Images California’s Kincade Fire Burn Scar From Space

NASA’s ECOSTRESS Detects Amazon Fires from International Space Station

Carbon Monoxide From Brazil Fires Mapped by NASA Satellite

Chimpanzees Keep Throwing Stones at the Same Trees – Scientists Want To Know Why

Coffee May Protect the Liver in More Ways Than Scientists Realized

AI Just Uncovered a Hidden Secret Inside Water

Scientists Catch a “Jumping Gene” Moving Between Species

This Tiny-Bead Procedure Is Helping Patients Avoid Knee Replacement

Neanderthals Nearly Vanished 75,000 Years Ago – Then One Group Repopulated Europe

AI Detects Hidden Warning Signs Before Major Earthquakes

Scientists Have Found Evidence That Dark Matter May Not Be Playing by the Rules

NASA’s MISR Sees California Wildfire Smoke Plumes Traveling Miles Into the Atmosphere

Related Articles