Satellite View of Burned Areas in the Pacific Northwest

Now that the wildfire season is nearly over in the Northwest, and with some relatively clear days, we can view the damage using NASA's high-resolution satellites.

Let's take a look at the damage using the NASA MODIS satellite, which can view the earth using wavelengths that distinguish burn scars (corrected reflectance bands 7-2-1).  Burn scars will show up as red.

Here is the imagery for region during the afternoon of Tuesday, October 3.  You can see the large burned areas in British Columbia.... fires that produced a lot of smoke for us here in western Washington.

Here is a blow up of the interior of BC.  Huge areas that were torched (again red)

Let me show you the same image from one year before (Sept 30, 2016). No red area.   The aquamarine area is snow.  You will notice there was more snow this year than last.

What about the Washington State fires? Here is the imagery for this year (again, October 3).  You can see the burnt areas NE of Mt. Rainier and east of Snoqualmie Pass.  Look closely and you can see the fire zone near the Columbia Gorge.  And there are several burned areas near the Columbia River in eastern WA.

The same image a year before showed other fires that had healed over a year and some that hadn't (such as the one east of Mt. Adams.

Irrespective of the smoke, this was only a moderate wildfire season over Washington State in terms of acres burned....far less that 2015, for example.  One saving grace was the relative sparsity of lightning, due to the persistent high pressure over the region.  And we started with moist conditions after the wettest winter/spring in many years.

For those worried about wildfires next year, the news that we are entering an La Nina winter is a good tiding.  La Nina winters tend to be wetter and cooler than normal.   Furthermore, the latest NMME seasonal forecasts provided by NOAA for February through April are far cooler/wetter conditions (see forecasts below)

Our public officials have a lot of work ahead of them to reduce wildfire threats.  We need an education campaign to stop the senseless human-caused fires from the use of fireworks, irresponsible campfires, firearms practice, and vehicles.   We need to invest in restoring our east-side forests to their earlier state and allowing regular, low-intensity fires.  We need to pull people away from living at the urban/forest interface, and invest in better weather/fire forecasting capabilities.