Wildfires From Space: Part III — The Bobcat Fire near Los Angeles

Posted on Thu 15 October 2020 in wildfires

The Bobcat Fire just north of Los Angeles one of the numerous wild fires which affected the US West Coast in recent weeks. The fire started on September 6th, 2020, and burned more than 110,000 acres.

To visualize the impact of the fire, I mosaicked two recent true-color images taken from space by ESA's Sentinel-2 satellite. You can download high-resolution versions of these images here and here.

Image details

Both images were taken by ESA's Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite and turned into cloud-free mosaics using Google's Earth Engine platform. You can recreate the second image using the following Earth Engine script:

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var mosaic = ee.ImageCollection('COPERNICUS/S2_SR')
    .filterBounds(geometry)
    .filterDate('2020-09-30', '2020-10-01')
    .sort('CLOUDY_PIXEL_PERCENTAGE', false)
    .mosaic()
    .clip(geometry);

var params = {bands: ['TCI_R', 'TCI_G', 'TCI_B'],
              min: 0.0,
              max: [250, 250, 250],
              gamma: [1.45, 1.45, 1.45]
};

Map.addLayer(mosaic, params, 'mosaic');