Jesusita Fire Severity

Last Friday I was invited to participate in a conference call with CALFIRE, the disaster coordinator at USGS, and a lot of vendors / gov't entities. The topic was the Jesusita Fire in Santa Barbara, CA. We discussed the needs of the CALFIRE folks, the availability of various satellite imagery -- including Landsat, ASTER, SPOT, and the hi-res fellas (through NGA) Quickbird, IKONOS, and WorldView.

Last year I mapped every fire in the state of California that burned more than 1,000 acres, and since this fire was on both USFS and California lands, I was being asked to provide a map of the severity once it was out.

We were lucky to have a good Landsat collection last Saturday and I created my BARC layer. When I create these layers, I often drape them over the imagery and terrain in Google Earth and provide that KMZ to the BAER team or whomever requests the data. This screen shot is the Jesusita BARC in Google Earth.