![]() In July, more than three times as many acres had burned compared to the previous year through that date, with drought, extreme heat, and reduced snowpack contributing to the severity of the fires. In January 2021 alone, 297 fires burned 1,171 acres on nonfederal land, which is almost triple the number of fires and more than 20 times the acreage of the five-year average for January. Story by Kathryn Hansen.The 2021 wildfire season in California experienced an unusually early start amid an ongoing drought and historically low rainfall and reservoir levels. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. The image has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The image was taken by a member of the Expedition 65 crew. ![]() Astronaut photograph ISS065-E-220417 was acquired on August 4, 2021, with a Nikon D5 digital camera using a 116 millimeter focal length and is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Johnson Space Center. Geological Survey and GOES 17 imagery courtesy of NOAA and the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS). NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using Landsat data from the U.S. It is still less than half the size of the August Complex, which burned more than 1 million acres in 2020. Overnight (August 5 to August 6) the Dixie fire grew by about 70,000 acres (110 square miles/280 square kilometers) to become the third-largest fire on record in California. GOES-17 is operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) NASA helps develop and launch the GOES series of satellites. is visible in this image, acquired on August 6, 2021, with the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite 17 (GOES-17) (above). The enormous blanket of smoke from the Dixie fire and dozens of others burning across the western U.S. Wind blowing down the canyon carried some of the smoke toward the Sacramento Valley. Smoke, which can sink toward the ground during a temperature inversion, is especially apparent in the Feather River Canyon. Notice that while most of the smoke is being carried toward the north, some smoke hangs in the valleys and canyons south of the active fire areas. It burned through the historic Gold Rush era town of Greenville. With wind gusts as high as 40 miles per hour (65 kilometers per hour) that day, the fire quickly advanced across the dry mountain vegetation. In this view, the hottest and most active parts of the fire are orange-yellow. It combines natural-color with shortwave-infrared light to cut through some of the smoke and highlight the active fire fronts. The second image, also acquired on August 4, shows the fire as observed by the Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) on Landsat 7. On August 4, 2021, an astronaut on the International Space Station shot a photo of the Dixie fire’s thick smoke plume (top). ![]() As of August 6, 2021, the Dixie fire had charred more than 432,000 acres (675 square miles/1,750 square kilometers). The Dixie fire in Northern California has surpassed the Bootleg fire in Oregon to become the largest fire so far this year in the United States.
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