Mid-March Nebraska Fires
Approximately a month ago, several fires erupted across western Nebraska, where the Morrill Fire and the Cottonwood Fire burned ~642,000 acres and 130,000 acres, respectively. An aerial view of the Cottonwood Fire is provided below via social media.
Both fires erupted during the afternoon of 12 March 2026. Smaller fires also ignited in Nebraska, Kansas and western South Dakota during the same time period. The high refresh rate from geostationary satellites captured significant cloud cover across the domain, while the fires appear in white and red pixels at 2-km spatial resolution. In the GOES-19 ABI 3.9 um animation, the Morrill and Cottonwood fire hotspots initiate, rapidly spread to the southeast, then shift to the south, as a gusty cold front approaches from the north. Refer to the 24 hour animation below. The Morrill Fire is located east of Scottsbluff, NE, and south of Alliance, NE, while the Cottonwood Fire was detected to the southeast of North Platte, NE.
GOES-19 ABI 3.9 um from ~15Z, 12 March 2026 to ~15Z, 13 March 2026
During the early morning hours of 13 March 2026, the JPSS NOAA-21 satellite detected the emitted lights from the fires, along with emitted city and town lights, provided by the VIIRS Day/Night Band (DNB). A comparison animation can be seen below, that highlights the nighttime visible imagery and the shortwave infrared to help identify which emitted lights are associated with the fires and which lights correspond with cities. Thermal hotspots and their corresponding emitted lights are observed within the yellow boxes in the animation. Note, emitted lights that do not have a thermal hotspot can be inferred as city lights. Both datasets exhibit 750-m spatial resolutions.
NOAA-21 VIIRS DNB and 3.7 um (M12) comparison at 0810Z, 13 March 2026