This week Robert has been looking at information about the Carr fire that has been burning for a week in Shasta County near Redding.  In particular, he has been looking at the “real-time” fire map that the National Interagency Fire Center has up.  It uses satellite images to constantly refresh data about fires.  Hot flames show up as red, less intense fire as orange, and smoldering as yellow.

Check it out here.

After watching the fire for a week, Robert is pretty fascinated about how the fire fighters must plan their strategies using natural and manmade fire lines.  For the Carr fire, it seemed likely that they would use Highway 299 and the mountain ridge dividing Shasta and Trinity Counties as lines that would be defended.  They have something like 30 water helicopters, and they can drop water along those lines, it seems.  Sure enough, the fires are not moving significantly past those lines. It took the fire about 3 days to get to those lines, but they did not get much further in the following 4 days.  The firefighters have a way to moving the fire into itself.  Pretty cool