The Southern California wildfires — as seen from space By Marwa Eltagouri December 8
This NASA Earth Observatory false-color image taken Dec. 5 shows the wildfires in Ventura County, Calif. (Joshua Stevens/NASA Earth Observatory)
Thick plumes of smoke and bright flames of the wildfires ravaging Southern California this week can be seen from space.
The state’s biggest active blaze is in Ventura County, where the Thomas Fire continued to grow Friday and burned more than 200 square miles and destroyed more than 400 buildings. Another 85 structures were damaged, the county fire department said. The fire started Monday evening and erupted overnight. The European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellite on Tuesday captured a false-color image of the blaze based on observations of light visible and invisible to human eyes. The image depicts the active fires as orange, and the burn scar — the areas where the burning has made the ground less able to hold water and more likely to flood — as brown. Unburned vegetation is shown as green, and developed areas are gray.
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A second, natural-color image of the region taken on the same day on NASA’s Terra satellite shows smoke from the fire billowing into the Pacific Ocean.
This NASA Earth Observatory natural-color image taken Dec. 5 shows the wildfires in Ventura County, Calif. (Joshua Stevens/NASA Earth Observatory)
Wildfires have ravaged Southern California for five days. The blazes continued Friday as new fires streamed through communities and injured several people.
Astronaut Randy Bresnik of the NASA Expedition 52-53 crew tweeted Wednesday that he was asked if he could see the wildfires from space. “Unfortunately we can,” he said in a tweet, posting three photos.
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He said he hoped the smoke would clear over the city of Ventura soon.
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NASA Earth During an engineering flight test of the Cloud-Aerosol Multi-Angle Lidar (CAMAL) instrument, pilot Stu Broce captured this view from NASA's ER-2 aircraft at roughly 65,000 feet showing smoke plumes produced by the #ThomasFire, #RyeFire & #CreekFire around 1pm PDT, Dec. 5th, 2017.
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7:17 AM - Dec 7, 2017
On Friday, President Trump declared an emergency in California and ordered federal aid to the state after Gov. Jerry Brown (D) declared states of emergencies in four counties. Hundreds of schools were shuttered, with some housing people who had fled their homes.
A new fire in San Diego began Thursday and grew rapidly and ferociously, spreading across 4,000 acres by Thursday night. The county’s deputy chief administration officer, Ron Lane, said he had never seen December winds like these.
Those winds — known as the Santa Ana — usually occur from spring to late fall or early winter. A high-pressure system forms over the Great Basin Desert and pushes air west toward lower-pressure areas of the coast.
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As the winds tumble over the Sierra Nevada and Santa Ana mountains, they drop from high elevation to sea level, compressing and heating up in the process. The winds also gain speed as they roll over the mountains, and — suddenly — dry, hot air starts racing toward the coast.
As it heads toward the coast, the air hits parched vegetation: a recipe for a fire. Once the fire starts, the winds rapidly carries it to new areas.
The Thomas Fire burns between U.S. Highway 101 and the Pacific Ocean. (Stuart Palley for The Washington Post) (Joshua Stevens/NASA Earth Observatory)
Dry weather made the region particularly ripe for major fires. The winds followed nine of the driest consecutive months in Southern California’s history, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory climatologist Bill Patzert told the Los Angeles Times. The most severe winds carrying the blazes could ease Friday and Saturday, according to forecasts, which could lessen the fire damage. But the National Weather Service still warns that the risk of fires will stay elevated through Sunday as conditions continue to be abnormally dry and breezy. Bonnie Berkowitz and Aaron Steckelberg contributed to this report.
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New evacuations as huge Southern California fire flares up Posted: Dec 10, 2017 11:48 PM IST LOS ANGELES (AP) - A flare-up on the western edge of Southern California's largest and most destructive wildfire sent residents fleeing Sunday, as wind-fanned flames churned through canyons and down hillsides toward coastal towns.
Crews with help from water-dropping aircraft saved several homes as unpredictable gusts sent the blaze churning deeper into foothill areas northwest of Los Angeles that haven't burned in decades. New evacuations were ordered in Carpinteria, a seaside city in Santa Barbara County that has been under fire threat for days.
"The winds are kind of squirrely right now," said county fire spokesman Mike Eliason. "Some places the smoke is going straight up in the air, and others it's blowing sideways. Depends on what canyon we're in."
The department posted a photo of one residence engulfed in flames before dawn. It's unclear whether other structures burned. Thousands of homes in the county were without power.
Firefighters made significant progress Saturday on other fronts of the enormous fire that started Dec. 4 in neighboring Ventura County. Containment was way up on other major blazes in Los Angeles, Riverside and San Diego counties.
Forecasters said Santa Ana winds that whipped fires across the region last week were expected to die down later Sunday - but not before creating possible gusts topping 50 mph (80 kph).
A lack of rain has officials on edge statewide because of parched conditions and no end in sight to the typical fire season.
"This is the new normal," Gov. Jerry Brown warned Saturday after surveying damage from the deadly Ventura fire. "We're about ready to have firefighting at Christmas. This is very odd and unusual."
High fire risk is expected to last into January and the governor and experts said climate change is making it a year-round threat.
Overall, the fires have destroyed nearly 800 homes and other buildings, killed dozens of horses and forced more than 200,000 people to flee flames that have burned over 270 square miles (700 square kilometers) since Dec. 4. One death, so far, a 70-year-old woman
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The Ventura County blaze continued to burn into rugged mountains in the Los Padres National Forest near the little town of Ojai and toward a preserve established for endangered California condors.
As fires burned in Ventura and Los Angeles counties, firefighters were already in place north of San Diego on Thursday when a major fire erupted and rapidly spread in the Fallbrook area, known for its avocado groves and horse stables in the rolling hills.
The fire swept through the San Luis Rey Training Facility, where it killed more than 40 elite thoroughbreds and destroyed more than 100 homes - most of them in a retirement community. Three people were burned trying to escape the fire that continued to smolder Sunday.
Most of last week's fires were in places that burned in the past, including one in the ritzy Los Angeles neighborhood of Bel-Air that burned six homes and another in the city's rugged foothills above the community of Sylmar and in Santa Paula.
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