The Western US Fires of 2020 in 10 Seconds
I've begun constructing a movie of the last 20 years of fires in the Western United States. So far, I only completed it for the year 2020 and may redo that with a higher time resolution. This is using data from various NASA satellites accessed through the firms interface (here for the interface: https://firms2.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/ and here for the blog entry I made containing the animation: http://www.littlegrove.com/2021/03/fires-in-western-united-states-2020.html ).
Early in the year the fires are dominantly in agricultural lands, which I interpret as burning woody plant trimmings and fields, such as in the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys of California. The pixels indicating fire are separated by and large, forming single point fires that do not spread.
At the middle of August through early October the massive fires appear as enormous blotches of solid red - entire area burns - followed by expanding rings and moving edges as the center of the burn runs out of fuel and the fire proceeds to unburned areas. Entire mountain ranges are traversed by single fires, such as the Cascades, the Sierra Nevada, and the Inner North Coast Ranges of California.
Two interesting points warrant notice. First, some lists of California Wildfires in 2020 miss many of these enormous fires, as fires on Federal lands seem to not make it into all the lists as well as some other jurisdictions. Second, several of the fires are reported with "extinguished" dates that are not meaning literally all the fire has finished burning within the area, for example, the Santa Cruz August Lightning Complex Fire was still smouldering in places as of February 2021.
The 2020 Firefollowers project is starting to capture the species succession processes that are kicked off by these fires ( https://inaturalist.ca/posts/47584-become-a-california-fire-follower ).
