Immediately following California’s declaration of its State-of-Emergency, Spot Image began acting on customer requests and working with various US government agencies to provide wide scale coverage of no fewer than five major fires and the areas threatened around them. The rapid response exercised by Spot Image required detailed programming of all three SPOT satellites and archive searches to aid in pre-fire awareness. Due to their extensive network of resources, Spot Image was able to collect imagery almost daily, with an average of 10,000 to 20,000 square kilometers of land area covered each day.  

SPOT 5’s capture of the Harris fire and SPOT 4’s capture of the Witch fire on October 22^nd were the first commercial imagery scenes provided for the response to the California fires. As the fires’ intensity increased, so too did the SPOT collections over the endangered and devastated areas and the fires themselves. Dissemination of the imagery data was conducted with direct and passive downlink to satellite ground stations in the western United States and Canada throughout the support effort. To further increase the data delivery rate to decision-makers, Google KMZ files were provided showing SPOT’s quick-look images atop Google Earth’s base map data.

SPOT Image Corporation contributed SPOT data as part of the compilation of imagery made available by Google (see Official Google Blog post). This data is available as part of a master layer  that includes SPOT 10m XI imagery acquired on Oct 22 showing fires in the Poway and San Bernandino area, north of San Diego. The SPOT data is portrayed at full resolution for visualization in Google Earth.

In addition to viewing the master layer, you can view all SPOT imagery of the affected areas by clicking on the links below.