Texas Fires
Fires erupted over the Texas Panhandle during the last week of February 2024. The fires burned over 1+ million acres, where the Smokehouse Creek Fire became the largest fire in Texas state history. Videos of the fires and drone footage of the destruction were vast. Geostationary and polar-orbiting satellites captured the event over the course of the week.
The GOES-16 Fire Temperature RGB observed the rapid fire spread from 1756Z – 2056Z, 27 February 2024. Refer to the animation below.
During the same timeframe, the NOAA-20 and SNPP VIIRS Fire Temperature RGB captured the fires at 1830Z, 1920Z, and 2010Z. The VIIRS RGB exhibits a 750-m spatial resolution.
The VIIRS Day Fire RGB provides another way to monitor fires as the RGB is sensitive to fire smoke and burn scars. The RGB has a finer spatial resolution of 375-m and observes smoke plumes that advect to the east. Note, clouds can also be seen near or above the fires as well.
A quantitative VIIRS Active Fires product (accessed online via RealEarth) observed the fire intensities, expressed in MegaWatts (MW). The fire pixels are color coded from yellow to orange to red to dark red colors, where red and dark red colors indicate the most intense fires. Refer to the SNPP VIIRS product image below that shows the fire intensities at ~1918Z, 27 February 2024.
Nighttime visible imagery from the VIIRS NCC product also captured the emitted lights from the fires on 28 February at 0740Z and 0830Z. The emitted lights from the fires are seen within the white ellipse in the Texas Panhandle.
Users can differentiate between the emitted lights from the fires and the emitted lights from the cities / towns by comparing the VIIRS 3.74 um with the nighttime visible imagery. See the animation below. Within the white ellipse, users can identify the warm brightness temperatures in the VIIRS 3.74 um that align with the emitted lights in the VIIRS NCC product. Note, emitted lights that do not have a corresponding thermal signature in the VIIRS 3.74 um, are identified as city or town lights (e.g., Amarillo, TX).