The Electra Fire

The Electra Fire started on July 4th, 2022 at 6:42 PM PDT near Electra Rd and Highway 49 in Sierra Nevada Gold Country. The fire has burned over 4,400 acres as of July 11, 2022. In the first few days of the Electra Fire, over 1,200 structures were threatened and 2,300 Pacific Gas and Electric Co. customers lost power. Evacuation orders were issued impacting about 1,000 people in Amador and Calaveras counties. The Electra Fire was captured in an ECOSTRESS Land Surface Temperature image on July 6th, 2022 at 07:46 AM PDT with temperatures reaching 80 degrees Fahrenheit in the fire.

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.