The Rices Fire

The Rices Fire started on June 28th, 2022 in Northern California near the Yuba River in Nevada County. The fire has burned over 900 acres and has destroyed one structure. French Corral, Birchville, and other communities were evacuated, but orders have since been lifted. There have been some firefighter injuries reported, but not casualties. The fire was captured in an ECOSTRESS Land Surface image on June 29 at 09:09 AM PDT and shows the temperatures surpassing 130 degrees Fahrenheit.

ECOSTRESS is a thermal instrument on the International Space Station that measures the temperature of the ground, which is hotter than the air temperature during the day. It was launched to the space station in 2018. Its primary mission is to identify critical thresholds of water use and water stress in plants and to detect the timing, location, and predictive factors leading to plant water uptake decline and/or cessation. The nature of the high-resolution data provided by ECOSTRESS allows it to record heat related phenomena such as heat waves and wildfires.

The ECOSTRESS mission launched to the International Space Station on June 29, 2018. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages the mission for the Earth Science Division in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. ECOSTRESS is an Earth Venture Instrument mission; the program is managed by NASA's Earth System Science Pathfinder program at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

More information about ECOSTRESS is available here: https://ecostress.jpl.nasa.gov/.

For information on Earth science activities aboard the International Space Station, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/issearthscience.