Wildfires From Space: Part I — The CZU Lightning Complex in the Santa Cruz Mountains

Posted on Sat 26 September 2020 in wildfires

The CZU Lightning Complex in the Santa Cruz Mountains is one of several significant wild fires which affected the US West Coast in recent weeks. The fire started on August 16, 2020, and burned more than 80,000 acres over a period of several weeks.

To visualize the impact of the fire, I mosaicked two recent true-color images taken from space by ESA's Sentinel-2 satellite. You can download high-resolution versions of these images here and here.

Image details

Both images were taken by ESA's Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite and turned into cloud-free mosaics using Google's fabulous Earth Engine platform. You can recreate the image for September 6th using the following Earth Engine script:

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var mosaic = ee.ImageCollection('COPERNICUS/S2_SR')
    .filterBounds(geometry)
    .filterDate('2020-09-05', '2020-09-07')
    .sort('CLOUDY_PIXEL_PERCENTAGE', false)
    .mosaic()
    .clip(geometry);

var params = {bands: ['TCI_R', 'TCI_G', 'TCI_B'],
              min: 0.0,
              max: [250, 250, 250],
              gamma: [1.45, 1.45, 1.45]
};

Map.addLayer(mosaic, params, 'mosaic');