Forest Fires in the United States


Forest Fires in the United States

12 June 2013

On June 25, 2013, the ISERV Pathfinder camera on the International Space Station captured this view of the the Royal Gorge wildfire scar.  The blaze destroyed 48 of the 52 structures at Royal Gorge Bridge & Park, an amusement park on the rim of Royal Gorge. An aerial tram, antique carousel, and the park’s visitor center were among the structures lost. While the fire caused damage on both sides of the gorge, the Royal Gorge Bridge—the centerpiece of the park—escaped with only minor damage. The bridge stands 955 feet (291 meters) above the Arkansas River, making it one of the highest suspension bridges in the world.

These images taken by Expedition 36 crew on board of the International Space Station (ISS) on June 19, 2013, show thick smoke billows across the landscape in these digital photographs of the western United States.
The images show a plume wafting from the West Fork Complex fire, which was burning explosively in southwestern Colorado near Pagosa Springs. To the northwest, a smaller plume from the Wild Rose fire is also visible (upper image).
The West Fork Complex is a combination of three fires: the West Fork fire, the Windy Pass fire, and the Papoose fire. Lightning ignited the first of the blazes on June 5, 2013, and together they had charred approximately 75,000 acres (30,000 hectares) by June 25. The fires were burning in rugged terrain with large amounts of beetle-killed spruce forests.

On June 21, 2013, the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) on the Terra satellite acquired this view of the burn scar of the Black Forest fire near Colorado Springs. Vegetation-covered land is red in the false-color image, which includes both visible and infrared light. Patches of unburned forest are bright red. Unburned grasslands are pink. The darkest gray and black areas are the most severely burned. Buildings, roads, and other developed areas appear light gray and white.
Edith Wolford elementary school (in the middle of teh image) though it was in the middle of an area that was severely burned, survived intact partly because of the large, treeless parking lot surrounding it.

On June 22, 2013, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’sAqua satellite captured this image of the West Fork fire complex burning in the San Juan and Rio Grande National Forests of southwestern Colorado. Red outlines indicate hot spots where MODIS detected unusually warm surface temperatures associated with fire. The fires were burning in rugged terrain with large amounts of beetle-killed spruce forests. South Fork, a nearby town with about 400 people, has been evacuated.

On June 12, 2013, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites captured these images of the fire about 30 kilometers northeast of Colorado Springs. The Terra image (top) was collected at 12:05 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time, and the Aqua image (lower) was collected at 1:40 p.m. MDT. Red outlines indicate hot spots where MODIS detected the unusually warm surface temperatures associated with fires.

On June 11, 2013, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image of the Royal Gorge, Big Meadows, and Black Forest fires burning in Colorado. Red outlines indicate hot spots where MODIS detected unusually warm surface temperatures associated with fires.

  • Black Forest fire report (published by Rcky Mountain Incident Reporting System (RMIRS), 11 June 2013)

  • Royal Gorge fire report  (published by Incident Information System, 11 June 2013)

  • Big Meadows fire report (published by Incident Information System, 10 June 2013)

WildlandFire relatednews from the Media:Note: The hyperlinks on the left side of each news are password-protected (User ID and password to enter the GFMC database are available for partners of GFMC. To obtain the ID and password, please send your query to fire@fire.uni-freiburg.de). The links on the right side (in brackets) are leading to the original news source; sometimes these news are expiring rather swiftly – a reason for the establishment of the internal GFMC database):

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