281,893 Acres

California’s largest wildfire on record (the Thomas Fire in southern CA), 10/2017 to 1/2018. Satellite imagery in false-color composite (SWIR2-NIR-Blue) to visualize active fires and burn scar (red) on vegetation (green) and buildings (grey). Landsat-8 data courtesy of US Geological Survey.

The fire burned for more than a month, though its spread was contained several weeks ago. Heavy rains earlier this week, which caused land burned by the fire to create mudflows that buried neighborhoods, helped fully extinguish the blaze. In the end, the fire burned 281,893 acres.

The fire eclipsed the 2003 Cedar fire in San Diego County, which burned 273,246 acres.

The milestone reaffirmed 2017 as the most destructive fire season in the state. In October, a series of fires in wine country burned more than 10,000 homes and killed more than 40 people.

Those blazes, along with the Thomas fire, were fueled by dry conditions and intense winds.

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-thomas-fire-contained-20180112-story.html

Before and after comparison highlighting the Thomas Fire’s extent. Satellite images in false-color composite (SWIR-NIR-Blue) to visualize active fires and burn scar (red) on vegetation (green) and buildings (grey). Landsat-8 data courtesy of US Geological Survey.

Thomas Fire progression map as of Dec 25 2017 produced by California Dept. of Forestry and Fire Protection [via Wikipedia]

License, Sources, and Technical Notes:

• Animated GIF and Juxtapose images licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
• Landsat-8 bands combination: 7 (shortwave infrared 2), 5 (near infrared), 2 (blue)
• Source GeoTiff files from Google Cloud Public Datasets:
  ‘LC08_L1TP_042036_20171022_20171107_01_T1’,
  ‘LC08_L1TP_042036_20171209_20171223_01_T1’,
  ‘LC08_L1TP_042036_20171225_20180103_01_T1’,
  ‘LC08_L1TP_042036_20180126_20180207_01_T1’
• Made in Python with Jupyter notebooks, sat-utils, geojson.io, rasterio, ezgif.com, juxtaposeJS