ISS - ECOSTRESS Mission logo.
Sept. 9, 2020
On Sept. 6, NASA’s ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS) imaged active fires across California, including the El Dorado fire near Yucaipa and the Valley fire in Japatul Valley in the southern part of the state. As of Sept. 8, there were 25 major wildfires burning in California.
Both images, taken at 12:13 a.m. PDT (3:13 a.m. EDT), show multiple concentrated areas of surface temperatures (in red) higher than 375 degrees Fahrenheit (191 degrees Celsius). These high temperature regions were likely where the active fires were occurring. The surrounding areas show abnormally warm middle-of-the-night background surface temperatures (orange) due to the ongoing heat wave.
ECOSTRESS, Studying Plant Water Use and Stress on ISS
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California built and manages the ECOSTRESS mission for the Earth Science Division in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. ECOSTRESS is an Earth Venture Instrument mission; the program is managed by NASA's Earth System Science Pathfinder program at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. Future studies could use ECOSTRESS data products in a similar fashion as land surface temperature was used to assess the fires pictured above.
Image above: This NOAA/NASA Suomi NPP satellite image from Sept. 7, 2020, shows the night band image of the Creek Fire at night as well as the smoke from the fire causing lights at night to diffuse or "bloom." NASA’s satellite instruments are often the first to detect wildfires burning in remote regions, and the locations of new fires are sent directly to land managers worldwide within hours of the satellite overpass. Together, NASA instruments detect actively burning fires, track the transport of smoke from fires, provide information for fire management, and map the extent of changes to ecosystems, based on the extent and severity of burn scars. NASA has a fleet of Earth-observing instruments, many of which contribute to our understanding of fire in the Earth system. Satellites in orbit around the poles provide observations of the entire planet several times per day, whereas satellites in a geostationary orbit provide coarse-resolution imagery of fires, smoke and clouds every five to 15 minutes. Image Credits: NOAA/NASA.
Related article:
NOAA-NASA Suomi NPP Captures Fires and Aerosols Across America
https://orbiterchspacenews.blogspot.com/2020/09/noaa-nasa-suomi-npp-captures-fires-and.html
More information about ECOSTRESS is available here: https://ecostress.jpl.nasa.gov
For information on Earth science activities aboard the International Space Station, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/issearthscience
Suomi NPP (National Polar-orbiting Partnership): http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/NPP/main/index.html
Taken from CALFire daily wildfire update: https://www.fire.ca.gov/daily-wildfire-report/
Images, Animation,Text Credits: NASA/Tony Greicius/JPL-Caltech/NOAA.
Greetings, Orbiter.ch
