Thunderstorms over the weekend of July 14-15 brought thousands of lightning strikes to the state of Oregon. From those strikes over150 wildfires started which created a tremendous amount of work for Oregon firefighters. By Wednesday, the number of fires had been reduced to near 50. That is according to Oregon’s Department of Forestry. The lightning was predicted days in advance and land management agencies proactively brought in additional firefighting resources which helped quell the number of fires quickly putting out almost 100 fires in just a few days. Many of the remaining fires can be found burning in the southwest corner of the state on the Umpqua, Rogue River, Winema, and Siskiyou National Forests as seen in this satellite photo which was collected on July 18, 2018.
NASA’s EOSDIS provides the capability to interactively browse over 600 global, full-resolution satellite imagery layers and then download the underlying data. Many of the available imagery layers are updated within three hours of observation, essentially showing the entire Earth as it looks “right now”. This natural-color satellite image was collected on July 18, 2018. Actively burning areas, detected by thermal bands, are outlined in red. NASA image courtesy NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS) project. Caption: Lynn Jenner