Weather S01E05 Wildfires from space: Tutorial on how to use NASA Worldview for wildfire forecasts.

[@MountainParameters]

As I work with Worldview, I seem to find I am changing my layers daily as I find new ones of interest. For wildfires I really like to use Comparison Mode in Worldview. Terra satellite goes over North America in the mornings, and Aqua in the afternoon. You can place both 'A' and 'B' sliders on a date of interest when cloud cover was sparse enough to view the fires. You can either place the A and B sliders on top of each other to view the same day differences between morning and afternoon), or separate them by an interval of one day (if you do this use 'Aqua' view for the earlier day, and then 'Terra' for the subsequent day). Turn on 'Fires and Thermal Anomalies' layers for both Aqua and Terra. Select 'A' and select the Terra view (under 'Base Layers', 'Corrected Reflectance'). Then select 'B' and deselect the Terra view, and select the Aqua view. Then use the slider to wipe between the area of interest. If you try this for the most recent date that was favourable for seeing ground cover after the fires started, it gives a good overview of the fire growth during the day especially if atmospheric conditions undergo a major change and shift the fire behaviour (as what happened during the fires in the Texas Panhandle on Feb 27-28 in 2024 when the winds shifted from W to N with devastating effect). I also find the night view 'Black Marble' in the 'Earth at Night' layer can be handy to compare wildfire growth (I did a 'Short' (titled, "Kelowna & Sushwap fires from space" ) that illustrates using the night view for the Kelowna Fires in 2023 if you'd like to see an example of what this looks like).