Nearly two thousand residents of communities in the San Bernardino Mountains had to evacuate their homes over the weekend of September 15, 2007, when a fast-spreading wildfire raced through the San Bernardino National Forest. According to the USDA Forest Service’s Incident Information Website, the Butler 2 Fire was an estimated 15,433 acres and 12 percent contained on September 17.
This image of the Butler 2 Fire northwest of Big Bear Lake was captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite on Saturday, September 15. The area in which MODIS detected actively burning fire is marked in red. A thick plume of smoke cuts northeast across the Mojave Desert.
The large image provided above has a spatial resolution (level of detail) of 250 meters per pixel. The MODIS Rapid Response Team provides twice-daily images of the region in additional resolutions.
NASA image courtesy the MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center
