Furious Nature: NASA captures bright flames of the California wildfires

California, December 9: California wildfires got furious as NASA captures the blazing pictures of it. Thick plumes of smoke and bright flames of the wildfires ravaging Southern California were captured by NASA. The state’s biggest active blaze is in Ventura County, where the Thomas Fire continued to grow Friday and burned more than 200 square miles and destroyed more than 400 buildings. Another 85 structures were damaged, the county fire department said. The fire started Monday evening and erupted overnight. 

The European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellite on Tuesday captured a false-color image of the blaze based on observations of light visible and invisible to human eyes. The image depicts the active fires as orange, and the burn scar: the areas where the burning has made the ground less able to hold water and more likely to flood as brown. Unburned vegetation is shown as green and developed areas are gray.

A second, natural-color image of the region taken on the same day on NASA’s Terra satellite shows smoke from the fire billowing into the Pacific Ocean.

Wildfires have ravaged Southern California for five days. The blazes continued Friday as new fires streamed through communities and injured several people.

Astronaut Randy Bresnik of the NASA Expedition 52-53 crew tweeted Wednesday that he was asked if he could see the wildfires from space. “Unfortunately we can,” he said in a tweet, posting three photos. On Friday, he tweeted two photos from the International Space Station as winds appeared to die down.

 

NASA Earth on Wednesday tweeted a photo of the smoke from 65,000 feet taken from an ER-2 aircraft, which operates as a flying laboratory. The aircraft, based at NASA Armstrong Building 703 in Palmdale, Calif., gathers data on Earth’s resources and celestial observations.

On Friday, President Trump declared an emergency in California and ordered federal aid to the state after Gov. Jerry Brown (D) declared states of emergencies in four counties. Hundreds of schools were shuttered, with some housing people who had fled their homes.

A new fire in San Diego began Thursday and grew rapidly and ferociously, spreading across 4,000 acres by Thursday night. The county’s deputy Chief Administrative Officer, Ron Lane, said he had never seen December winds like these.