Fires in Northern Washington

Fires in Northern Washington

Started in late July, the Tripod Complex Fire in northern Washington continued to grow at the beginning of the third week of August 2006. The National Interagency Fire Center estimated the fire at 83,436 acres and 25 percent contained on August 14. Residences and other structures remained threatened by the fire. This image of the fire, which is northeast of the town of Twisp, was captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite on August 13. Places where MODIS detected actively burning fire are outlined in red. To the southwest of Lake Chelan, the Tin Pan fire continued to smolder as well, putting out a plume of smoke even though the level of active fire was below MODIS’ detection threshold.

The high-resolution image provided above has a spatial resolution of 250 meters per pixel. The MODIS Rapid Response System provides twice-daily images at additional resolutions.

NASA image courtesy the MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center