The Lookout’s Zeke Lunder was on KQED’s forum on Friday, 8/2/2024 to talk about the Park Fire and wildfire resilience in California, in general. Here is a transcription of our conversation. You can listen to the broadcast here: Mina KimĀ Welcome to forum. I’m Mina Kim. Hotter temperatures expected this weekend and possible dry … Read more
Today the European Space Agency’s Sentinel Satellite went over the Park Fire. This satellite passes over every 5 days, and has sensors which can see through smoke and detect heat. We use Sentinel data a lot in my day job for vegetation and fuel mapping, but during wildfires, especially on fires as large as the … Read more
Good morning, Here are updated maps for the #ParkFire, flown about 2am, 7/26/2024. The white line represents about 8 hours of fire growth. Interpretation in the individual photo captions. Today’s weather forecast is really not great, with high atmospheric instability and strong SSW and SW winds. We’ll do a livestream tonight, and a quick one … Read more
Here is a really rough map of where the Park Fire might be at midnight, 7/24/2024. Red lines are camera azimuths, where heat was apparent. Crosses in the red lines are potential places the fire has reached. The red, yellow, and orange squares are satellite heat detections, and the blue polygon is Cal Fire’s (6,000 … Read more
Hello everyone, Our 7/22/2024 Mill Fire YouTube Livestream and 7/23/2024 newsletter featured commentary about the widespread structural challenges to maintaining wildfire-resilient vegetation conditions in forested subpisions. We covered this topic because it falls within the purview of our coverage of forestry, fire, and rural culture. As our video was focused on a fire in Eastern … Read more
Hey everyone, happy Thanksgiving. Today we’ve got a special feature – an interview with Bruno Seraphin and Deniss Martinez, who recently helped write a paper on indigenous fire futures which puts forward the thesis that if we are talking about giving land back to Native Americans, many communities won’t be able to thrive or manage … Read more
A hydropower flume sprung a major leak in Upper Butte Creek, above Chico, California on the 9th of August, 2023, spilling millions of gallons onto a forested hillside, and triggering a landslide which dumped over 1,000 cubic yards of rock, gravel, dirt, and clay into Butte Creek. This event caused widespread water pollution on the … Read more
Wolfy Rougle is Conservation Project Manager with the Butte County Resource Conservation District. She is a botanist, farmer, land tender, and illustrator. Among other things, she has written books about edible plants, and started the Butte Prescribed Burn Association (PBA). We met up with Wolfy to talk about her vision for citizen-led burning in Butte … Read more
Will Harling and I are sort of like brothers from different mothers. Both of us were raised up by the long-haired wolves, timber fallers, mechanics, railroaders, gold miners, and other outlaws who populate the hillbilly sticks of far Northern California. First opening day fishing trip with the grown-ups, Mill Creek, California, 1985. Not surprisingly, as … Read more
Rain is coming, but will high winds spread the fire farther north before it begins in earnest? We take a quick look at IR mapping from the evening of 9/23/2023 and assess current fire spread and tactics. We also watch footage of a very low drop from a DC-10 airtanker on the NE corner of … Read more
Rain is coming! In today’s video, we look at weather satellites, assess the current lay of the Anvil and SRF Complex Fires, and talk about lighting large prescribed fires out ahead of weather systems. Also, we interview Rachel Smith, Klamath National Forest Supervisor. We couldn’t get a video interview, so had to use a puppet. … Read more
The Anvil Fire has been active, with drier, windier conditions over the past couple days. This fire has been burning for nearly a month just inland of Port Orford, Oregon. It spread slowly for the first several weeks, but over the past week, it has seen major growth in most directions. We look at the … Read more
Strong winds have pushed the Anvil Fire around a bit in the past couple days. This fire has been burning for about 3 weeks just inland of Port Orford, Oregon. It spread slowly for the first two weeks, but in the past several days, it has seen major growth. We look at the geography of … Read more
The Anvil Fire has been burning for about 3 weeks just inland of Port Orford, Oregon. It spread slowly for the first two weeks, but in the past several days, it has seen major growth. We look at the geography of the fire, and review detailed maps of its recent movements. We also look at … Read more
The Anvil Fire has been burning for about 3 weeks just inland of Port Orford, Oregon. It spread slowly for the first two weeks, but in the past several days, it has seen major growth. We look at the geography of the fire, and review detailed maps of its recent movements. We also look at … Read more
The Anvil Fire has been burning for about 3 weeks just inland of Port Orford, Oregon. It spread slowly for the first two weeks, but in the past several days, it has seen major growth. We look at the geography of the fire, and review detailed maps of its recent movements. ļ»æ” Thanks always … Read more
In mid-August, 2023, lightning ignited many fires across NW California. Several became large, but most have stayed fairly small by modern standards. Rain knocked most of these fires down over the first few days of September, but even before then, the majority of the fire effects on these fires were low-moderate severity and ecologically beneficial. … Read more
Not much new spread to report this morning on NW Ca. fires. After the rains 2 weeks ago, technical specialists on the incident management teams in NW California said we shouldn’t expect things to dry out enough to burn until right about now. In addition to relatively mild conditions, one factor affecting the lack of … Read more
Over the past 3 weeks, lightning has ignited many fires in NW California and Western Oregon and several have become large. Rain knocked most of these fires down over the first few days of September, and since then, though conditions have been slowly drying, there has been very little active fire spread. This video looks … Read more
Our most destructive fires often occur in places most people don’t think of as being ‘wildlands’, but people from Paradise, Santa Rosa, Boulder County, and Lahaina have learned the hard way, living in an urban environment doesn’t mean your place isn’t at risk of burning down. This video talks about the difference between wildfires and … Read more
This article was written as the million-acre Dixie Fire neared its conclusion, in September 2021. Many bad things happened during the two months of action during this firefight, and much of the fire’s growth was affected by fire put on the ground during firefighting. Firing operations are one of the main tools firefighters have at … Read more
Over the past 3 weeks, lightning ignited many fires in NW California and Western Oregon and several have become large. This video uses satellite imagery from 8/31/2023 to evaluate how hot the fires burned in different areas. We discuss factors affecting differences in fire severity and what burn patterns can tell us about past land … Read more
Predicting Wildfire Spread Predicting wildfire spread is a difficult task, and current approaches often fall short in reliably describing fire behavior during severe conditions. We covered our experimental use of the Pyrecast fire spread forecasting models in depth with this article on 8/27. Since we ran the model 2 days ago, the large-scale weather forecast … Read more
Today’s Livestream aired at 7am. Lightning has ignited many fires in Western Oregon and several have become large. This video provides an overview of the largest fires, in the Tyee Ridge Complex, the Chilcoot Fire east of Roseburg and Glide, the Lookout Fire, near MacKenzie Bridge, and the Camp Creek Fire, in Portland’s water supply, … Read more
We use many different tools and models to evaluate upcoming threats of major fire spread or conditions which could allow rapid growth on new starts. I’m working as an evaluator on a project which is building new fire behavior forecasting tools for the California Energy Commission. This work is being supervised by the Spatial Informatics … Read more
Here today’s YouTube briefing on new fires in Northern California – 8/17/2023. We look at the active fires in California and current conditions. Bonus features: rants about selling carbon offsets for cut-over forests that burn all the time, and why putting out every fire doesn’t make sense. Head Fire Progression Maps The outer RED perimeter … Read more
Here today’s YouTube briefing on new fires in Northern California – 8/16/2023. Head Fire Progression Maps The outer RED perimeter was captured today 8-16-23 @3:30pm Red to Yellow Line represents approximately 16 hours fire growth White line (ignition point) was captured an hour before the yellow line 8/15-23 @ 10:30pm Overview of the Head Fire: … Read more
A note from the editor/Zeke: Last week part of a hydropower flume in Upper Butte Creek, near where we live, in Chico, California, collapsed, sending millions of gallons of water down a steep forested slope, and causing a landslide of mud and soil which poured into Butte Creek. This has caused many days of extremely … Read more
Let’s talk lightning! At least once a decade in California, a few hours of abundant and widespread ‘dry lightning’ (no rain) turn an average wildfire season into an exceptional one. Thousands of wildfires start, some in remote areas, and many will burn until fall rains come. Unlike human-caused fires, which grow quickly when they ignite … Read more
So wildfire season is finally starting to take off in Northern California. Here is a thread on why it has taken this long, and what it takes for us to have large fires in California: California has so many fire suppression resources it is hard for fires to escape initial attack unless at least one … Read more