California Smokers

Here's a powerful image from NASA showing the smoke from California wildfires. It's so murky that I find it hard to find the San Francisco Bay area, which is usually a great landmark when looking at satellite imagery of the California coast. Click on the image to see the full-scale version.

The smokiest part of the state appears to be the Sacramento Valley. The Big Sur blaze that's getting a lot of ink is further south, just below the big knob of bright white fog that is filling the Monterey Bay (about two-thirds down the image). Smoke is gray, fog and clouds are bright white.

This June 25 image is in natural-colors and from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite.

Comments

[Barry]

I live not far from the Big Sur fire (Officially, the Basin Complex fire). I can see the line of smoke daily from my home, and for a few days when it first started, smoke from it and the Indians Fire (same area, but over the coastal mountains) travelled north, making everything hazy and smelling like a camp fire. Typically, winds this time of year blow from the west. This is a difficult fire due to the difficulty of terrain, mountain sides that appear almost vertical.

This fire is very reminiscent from what I've read of the Marble Cone fire in 1977. That fire burned close to 180,000 acres. The Basin Complex fire is only 18% contained or so and is already at over 80,000 acres. What's interesting is, this fire, just like a previous fire near it in 1998 I believe was sparked by a very rare summer thunder storm. Coastal California doesn't often see lightning, but when it does, especially in summer, it means fire. This is why the native plants are fire adapted, to cope with this sort of thing.