1996 Aug 23 14:37 UT

This image was aquired by NOAA 12 at 14:37 UT over the western U.S. This was a morning pass.
Map of the pass
Channel 2 view of the data White areas are clouds.

This pass only covers the northwest and doesn't show any very active fire regions. The pass map shows more data than we actually got, or could retrieve in the end (we can sometimes track a bit below the horizon but this is quite out of line). We almost lost this data and had a lot of trouble salvaging this much. I could view the raw data on disk but couldn't get it to process. The data was exceptional, a far western pass with very good clarity, but unless something was done quickly it would be overwritten by when the next pass came in. We were down to about 30 minutes to data loss when I called SeaSpace and interrupted lunch for Robert Zimdar. He told me about a command to clear out one of the 4 data areas and when this finally worked it took the time pressure off. Then he suggested several things to check, system time is set automatically and was ok, our orbital elements turned out to be 10 days out of date. He felt this might cause the problem. These are normally updated every night by a cron job but clearly something was wrong with that. We got them updated manually but that still left the problem of how to retrieve the data known to be there. Robert suggested trying to process a specified area instead of the whole data set. I tried it and it worked. It was tedious to make the images seen on this page but they show some spectacular views. Robert gets a lot of credit for making this possible.

Very little smoke but several fire scars are seen in theses images. It's surprising how fast the smoke can clear. Time did not permit small images to be made. The Idaho and Montana images have very good detail and may be worth the wait.

Oregon

Color composite image using channels 1, 2, and 3. Only small areas of smoke are visible. Even Hell's Canyon is quite clear, last evening it had a lot of smoke nearby.

Washington

Color composite image using channels 1, 2, and 3. The image looses fine detail in the western part but still a lot of interesting features are visible. No apparent fires are seen but this image might show some fire scars if you know just where recent fires occurred.

Idaho

Color composite image using channels 1, 2, and 3. This image has spectacular detail. Last evenings smoke has cleared away with perhaps small amounts in Hell's Canyon and the area due east near the state border. The diagonal dark streak near the bottom is where the signal had problems getting through the treeline on our western horizon (see the pass map).

Montana

Color composite image using channels 1, 2, and 3. Another image with spectacular detail. Near the southeast corner some blue spots are visible. These are the scars from a grass fire which was seen in the images from Aug 18. The Aug 18 channel 3 image shows the fires as bright spots. They are also plotted on the Aug 18 Hot Spot Map.