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What does it look like when 10,800 lightning strikes spark 367 fires in the Bay Area and beyond?
This video, compiled from more than 400 satellite images from late Saturday through Thursday morning, is the answer — a fascinating view of California’s latest wildfire infernos from miles high in the sky.
The weekend’s freak lightning storms were only the ignition. Over the next 72 hours, hundreds of fires — some of them smoldering trees deep in the forest known as “sleepers” — exploded across Contra Costa, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, San Mateo, Marin, Sonoma and Napa counties.
The time-lapse video compiles three separate sets of satellite imagery taken at 30-minute intervals, downloaded using the SLIDER tool from the Regional and Mesoscale Meteorology Branch (RAMMB) and the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at Colorado State University.
The first layer shows lightning, flashes of bright light scattered over the first 36 hours. The fires begin to show up in the hours after the storms in the “natural fire color” view. Then, you can see smoke from the fires overtake the Bay Area on Wednesday with the classic satellite “natural color” view.
Sped up, in just one minute, watch how lightning progressed to fires and then to smoke.
