Before and After the Insane Fort McMurray Fire, From 350 Miles Above Earth

Last week, a firestorm leveled the northern Canadian city of Fort McMurray. It still burns, under a cloud of smoke and ash that hide how much it has destroyed. But only from the naked eye. Satellites equipped with infrared cameras have peered through the black cloud to reveal a charred Fort McMurray.
The images in the above gallery come from a pair of satellites operated by DigitalGlobe, a remote sensing company. Called WorldView 2 and 3, each looks at different swaths of the infrared spectrum, which allows them to see a dynamic picture of the devastation. This is not disaster porn. First responders use images like these to predict a fire’s movement, and plan their suppression efforts. And they provide those of us lucky enough to be far away from Fort McMurray a reminder of the dangers of a warming world.

Temperatures in Fort McMurray last week were close to 90˚F. In May. In Canada. Northern Canada. Fort McMurray is pretty far inland, but near the same latitude as Juneau, Alaska. That warm weather came off a pretty light snow year, which means the trees around the city were pretty dry. Add strong winds to the mix and you get, well, the situation playing out on these satellite images.
The WorldView-3 orbits at around 385 miles above the Earth’s surface. It is sun-synchronous, which means it is always in daylight. Its onboard camera has 16 different bands, one of which captures light in the short wave infrared spectrum. “As you move from visible light, to near infrared, to shortwave infrared, you are picking up sunlight reflected from the surface, but also the heat signature from planet itself,” says Kumar Navulur, DigitalGlobe’s senior director of strategic solutions. Essentially, the short wave infrared camera’s heat sensing ability lets it see the fire’s flicker through the cloud of smoke.

Another of DigitalGlobe’s satellites, the WorldView-2, also looked at the fire. Though it wasn’t able to peer through the smoke, it did allow DigitalGlobe’s technicians to create before and after images of the fire. Those technicians combine the infrared imagery with false color pictures of the landscape. Which leads to some weird color schemes. For instance, red is good, because it represents living forest. Burned areas are grey. “After a fire, all the chlorophyll in the trees is killed, so it has no color value,” says Navulur.

DigitalGlobe’s constellation of satellites collect over a million square miles of satellite imagery every day. In a year, that’s around 80 petabytes of data. They can fly over places like Fort McMurray once a day. “Once we collect the data, within about two hours it can be available online anywhere in the globe,” says Navulur.
Not just for first responders. DigitalGlobe’s clients include tech companies, governments, aid groups, oil and gas companies—virtually anyone with a desire to understand how the Earth works. Including other cities looking to protect themselves from the vagaries of the changing climate. “You want to prepare, react, recover,” says Navulur. Hotter, drier weather means longer fire seasons. Wetter, warmer winters means more flooding. Vigilance—aided by an all-seeing eye—is the best way to peer through the smoke of uncertainty for what is yet to come.

 http://www.wired.com/2016/05/insane-fort-mcmurray-fire-350-miles-earth/?mbid=social_fb#slide-5