Friday, March 11, 2011

Oklahoma / North Texas Wildfires on Satellite Imagery

**Note:  This post was originally made on 3-11-11 regarding wildfires in Oklahoma and Texas.  If you are looking for my post concerning the Texas wildfires of Labor Day Weekend 2011, please go to this link to see that post...

-------------------------------Original Post Continues Below:


Not to sound like a bad game of "Where's Waldo", but can you spot the largest fires burning in the above visible satellite image?

You can pull and view visible satellite imagery from hundreds of different sources on the internet, but the above image (taken shortly after 4:30 pm CST) came from the COD Weatherlab site.

It's easier to spot the smoke plumes by viewing a loop of the imagery (once at the link site, click "visible satellite animation" in the upper right corner of the page).

The easiest way to distinguish clouds from the smoke plumes is that the clouds are moving Southeast, while the smoke plumes are flowing North-Northeast from the fire origin sites.  Here are the ones that I found:


There are countless others burning, some are just not producing enough smoke to be detected as easily just yet.

The Governor of Oklahoma has declared a State of Emergency due to the wildfires raging across the state.

Wildfire danger will remain high on Saturday.  The areas in the pink shaded regions below are under a "Red Flag Warning" again for Saturday:




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