Recently we’ve been mapping burned vegetation now that the smoke has cleared. Our daytime flights have been one of the first times large fires have been regularly imaged during the day. NIROPS and others mostly fly at night, but our high resolution 16-bit depth allowed us to process during the day what 8-bit thermal provides at night. This means there are 5 bands of daytime imagery on almost 2 million acres of Northern California fires from beginning to end: 16-Bit RGB, NIR and thermal LWIR. There’s about 7 Terabytes on the Santa Cruz CZU, Santa Clara SCU, August, North and a few other fires. Sometimes we also have pre-burned vegetation captured as the fire grew closer to it. The agency owns the data, and I can’t give it out, but I can help process beneficial maps. I’ve created NDVIs and thermal maps. What else can be processed in ESRI, QGIS or other software that might help the State and Forest Service mitigate further damage like erosion and rebuild the forest to be more resilient?
Tonight we expect to be released. It took 2 months for August 17th lightning storm to run its course.