Small, greasy fires

I haven't posted in a week because I was out of town (spent three days at Bear Lake on the Idaho-Utah border). Of course, as I left, things heated up on the fire front. The fires have officially moved from Region 3 (Ariz. - New Mexico) and are migrating their way northward. I'm tracking and will map a few fires in Central Utah early next week, one in California today, and some in Minnesota as well. The fire in California made me chuckle a little. I got a call from the Plumas National Forest this morning asking for a BARC on the Grease Fire (scroll 2/3 the way down on that link for information). The hydrologist who called said the BAER team would be assembling today and would like the BARC today as well. Of course, they have no idea when the last Landsat was or when the next satellite overpass will be...they just assume I have BARC products sitting here waiting for someone to email them to.

Not only that, but the Grease Fire was contained at 366 acres (and they spent just under a million bucks suppressing this small little guy)! That's like 50 Landsat pixels! I wanted to call the guy back and say, "Sorry, we don't have any Landsat acquisitions lined up for that fire for the next 7 days or so, so you'd be better off spending $500 and flying all 366 acres in a helicopter to do your mapping." But I couldn't do that. There was a good Landsat just a few days ago. Now I just had to find the burn scar before I could order the scene.

The online quicklooks of the Landsat acquisitions are stored on EarthExplorer or GloVis, my tool of choice. The quicklooks are of marginal quality, although they have improved drastically in the recent year. The jpeg below is an example of the quicklook I found for the Grease Fire and I've pointed out the speckle known as the burn scar. I still wonder if it's worth us spending $580 for the scene plus my time to map this 366 acre fire for the Plumas NF.