Dang, it's cold

I'm currently sitting in a hotel room in Sioux Falls, SD. As we were flying in (in our tin can with wings), the pilot came over the intercom and reporting the temperature in Sioux Falls at 10 degrees. This was a 5pm. I imagine when we wake up tomorrow, it'll be below zero. Crystal clear night, no insulation for the atmosphere = bitter cold!

I had a hectic morning trying to wrap up a few fires that slipped through the cracks, but got as much done as I could. We're pretty confident that we got done what we said we'd do.

In the Pacific Northwest, we mapped 1,927 fires that burned more than 1,000 acres. Our project collaborators (USGS-EROS) mapped all fires in California (aka the Pacific Southwest). We are moving on to the Southwest (Arizona-New Mexico) and the Southeast next. Both are large undertakings because there are actually a ton of prescribed burns in the Southeast and Florida always has very active wildfire seasons. Half the energy exerted in this project is filtering through all the duplicate fire IDs/points to assign one as a primary, map it, and then attribute all the duplicates as such. Quite a challenge keeping these data straight.

We will soon start selecting new pre- and post-fire images for the next round of fires to map. Turns out I no longer have an offseason. I used to follow the baseball season with my BAER support, but now with the infusion of MTBS, I go from my BAER support straight to MTBS support and back again. Fire, fire, and more fire.

I did have a fun experience today in the airport, though. I was sitting next to some lady in the terminal waiting for my flight and then her husband returned from the restroom with a young child. I'd never seen the woman, but I immediately recognized the guy. He was a classmate of mine in high school. Turns out he lives in Brookings, SD and is pursuing a PhD in demographics at South Dakota State University. I hadn't seen this guy in 10 years (yup, I'm getting old) and we ended up sharing the same flight to South Dakota today.