The image below shows the same areas on September 26 as observed in natural color by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8. Beyond the fire burn scars, green and light brown areas likely indicate crop growth and harvesting or seasonal changes in trees and other vegetation.
Tan areas were significantly burned but still have some live vegetation.
Areas colored dark brown have little to no live vegetation left the landscape is mostly covered in soot, ash, and charred stumps and stems. Shades of tan and brown reveal the severity of the burns from each fire, with the darkest shades revealing the greatest damage to the landscape. The data were analyzed by remote sensing scientist Christopher Potter and colleagues at NASA’s Ames Research Center.
The technique, known as a normalized burn ratio, uses near-infrared and shortwave-infrared data collected on July 24 and September 26, 2020, to detect changes in the greenness of the landscape. The map above uses Landsat 8 satellite data to provide some measure of the severity of the burns from the SCU and CZU Lightning Complex fires of August and September 2020. Now state and federal agencies are working to assess the damage. Raging for weeks to months amid heat waves and dry weather, the fires charred millions of acres and consumed homes, livelihoods, and lives. This map was created by Liz Anderson, Emily Zentner, Veronika Nagy, Chris Hagan, Renee Thompson, Katy Kidwell and Helga Salinas.Following an unprecedented outburst of dry lightning in August 2020, wildfires ignited across the state of California. Fire namesĬapRadio changed the names of three fires on this map that included a racial slur in accordance with Associated Press guidelines and our own standards. Fires may be missing altogether or have missing or incorrect attribute data. As of September 2020, Cal Fire had found that the dataset is missing 483 notable fires and is looking to find and add these. However, the data is by nature incomplete and duplicates may exist. Ten acres is the federal minimum for reporting.Ĭal Fire says that this dataset - which runs from 1878 to 2020 as of April 2021 and is updated annually - is one of the most complete datasets of California’s fires through history. Cal Fire’s data includes timber fires that burned more than 10 acres, brush fires that burned more than 50 acres and grass fires that burned more than 300 acres, so some smaller fires may not be shown here. Some fires may be missing because historical records were lost or damaged, were too small for the minimum cutoffs, had inadequate documentation or have not yet been incorporated into the database. This means that the causes shown for some fires may be out of date. Cal Fire enters the cause of each year’s fires when this data is captured annually and does not update them if investigations are later completed or determinations are changed. Fire causesĪlso displayed here are the reported cause and acres of each fire shown. These fires are also categorized by the meteorological season in which they started, which are as follows: Winter (December - February), Spring (March - May), Summer (June - August) and Fall (September - November). 2020 is also shown separately because there has been only one recorded fire year so far in the 2020s decade in this dataset. Fires that started between 18 are shown separately here due to more inconsistencies in data for earlier fires. 77 fires that did not include a year in the data have been left out. These wildfires are categorized by the decade or time period in which they started. This map and data is not intended to be used for legal purposes or statistical analysis. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. This map shows the perimeters of more than 20,000 wildfires that have been recorded in California from 1878 to 2020 using data from Cal Fire, the National Parks Service, the U.S.