Fires in USA
Fires in Idaho and Eastern Oregon
20 July 2007
Strong winds fanned wildfires across the western United States on 19 July 2007. The hot, dry, windy conditions led the National Interagency Fire Center to move to a National Preparedness Level of 5 on a five-point scale, indicating that the fires were numerous, large, and widespread enough to potentially exhaust fire-fighting resources. More than a million acres were burning across the United States in 72 large wildfires on19 July 2007, said the National Interagency FireCenter.
TERRA / AQUA
19 July 2007
Among the largest fires were the Rowland and Elk Mountain fires burning in southwestern Idaho. The active fronts of these fires are outlined in red in this pair of photo-like images acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on 19 July 2007. The top image was taken at 12:25pm, Mountain Daylight Time, when MODIS flew over on NASAs Terra satellite. The active parts of the Elk Mountain fire surround a dark brown oval of charred land. The fast-moving flames had consumed much of this area in the previous 24hours. A MODIS image taken on the afternoon of 18 July, reveals that the fire had been relatively small the previous day, and little land around the fire wascharred. The Rowland fire, by contrast, was smaller on 19 July than it had been on18 July.
At 2:05 pm on 19 July, less than two hours after the top image was taken, MODIS aboard NASAs Aqua satellite captured the lower image. In that two-hourperiod, winds and fire activity picked up substantially. By this time, the fires were racing through grass and sagebrush and pumping out dense plumes of smoke. The smoke obscures the burned land and the surrounding desertlandscape. Strong winds were pulling the smoke north in long plumes that stretch over the green and gold Snake RiverPlain. The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) reported that both the Rowland and Elk Mountain fires exhibited extreme fire behavior, with fast-moving or unpredictableflames, and threatened structures and power lines. On 20 July, the Rowland fire had burned 95,000 acres and was 15 percentcontained, while the Elk Mountain fire had burned 160,000 acres (up from 25,000 acres the daybefore) and was 10 percent contained, said NIFC.
The large image provided above has a spatial resolution (level of detail) of250 meters per pixel.
(source: EarthObservatory)
