From NASA – Wildfires Light Up Western Australia (nothing unusual here, it happens every year) A stunning video of the Earth at night follows.
Careful observers of the new “Black Marble” images of Earth at night released this week by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have noticed bright areas in the western part of Australia that are largely uninhabited. Why is this area so lit up, many have asked?
Away from the cities, much of the night light observed by the NASA-NOAA Suomi NPP satellite in these images comes from wildfires. In the bright areas of western Australia, there are no nearby cities or industrial sites but, scientists have confirmed, there were fires in the area when Suomi NPP made passes over the region. This has been confirmed by other data collected by the satellite.
The extent of the night lights in this area is also a function of composite imaging. These new images were assembled from data acquired over nine days in April 2012 and 13 days in October 2012. This means fires and other lighting (such as ships) could have been detected on any one day and integrated into the composite picture, despite being temporary phenomena.
Because different areas burned at different times when the satellite passed over, the cumulative result in the composite view gives the appearance of a massive blaze. These fires are temporary features, in contrast to cities which are always there.
Other features appearing in uninhabited areas in these images could include fishing boats, gas flaring, lightning, oil drilling, or mining operations, which can show up as points of light. One example is natural gas drilling in the Bakken Formation in North Dakota.
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Here is a video of the Earth at night, showing the expanse of human development via energy. It is hard not to think of UHI when viewing these images.
I bet Al Gore says the wildfires are a sure sign of global warming.
Maybe Al can use snippets of this in his next movie, since Chris Tangey won’t let him use that firestorm footage.
Increased CO2 makes plant growth more productive and enables plants to conquer places that were too arid for them before; as they need less stomata for breathing and therefore lose less water. Independant of temperature this must have more biomass production and consequentially more wildfires as consequence. Cue the warmist, confusing correlation and causation again, blaming more wildfires on increased warming caused by his god molecule CO2.
Leave out the increased warming and the causal chain is intact. More CO2 leads to increased biomass production and to more wildfire. (but not measurably increased temperatures)
Makes me wonder. The population centres Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide are all clearly visible. The article text is right that the mid-west is sparsely populated but we do have a lot of mining activity out there now. But yeah, can’t be that much – there’s patches bigger than Melbourne and Sydney – so those fires must be big.
If you look at the enlarged version on the bottom right out to sea (below mainland, above east corner of Tasmania) you’ll see specks in the ocean. That’s where we have oil and gas platforms operating.
Thank you for clarifying this. When I saw the original image(s), my suspicions were aroused— as one who spends time in small boats on the ocean and in less-inhabited areas, I couldn’t help but wonder if the usual suspects were once more guilty of exaggeration through digital enhancement.
I am convinced that a part of the mass delusion that characterizes the warmistas is attributable to their sedentary urban existence. I have this image of the generic zealot: I picture someone huddled in a small apartment on the 45th floor of a New York apartment building who has never spent a night in the woods and would be utterly terrified by true darkness or 20-foot seas.
That is one helluva lot of wildfires …. hard to imagine that much of Australia burning over 9 days without any comment?
Maybe it is related to this almost unbelievable rort:
(I spoke to a guy whose family has long lived in that area – he says they have only had one major bushfire that burnt all their pastures in 70 years)
Burning savanna creates carbon credit cash
From: AAP November 02, 2012 2:13PM
AN indigenous organisation could earn up to $500,000 a year by selling carbon credits it creates by deliberately burning savannas ahead of the fire season to reduce the amount of pollution.
The Indigenous Land Corporation (ILC) has gained approval to generate the credits on its 1800 square kilometre Fish River property which is a two hour drive south of Darwin. It’s the first indigenous project approved under the carbon farming initiative (CFI) which forms part of the federal government’s carbon price regime.
Under the CFI, grasslands can be purposely burnt early in the dry season to reduce fuel load and therefore the severity of late-season fires. Savannas are also burnt to create fire breaks.
“Both actions reduce the high level of pollution that would otherwise be generated by out-of-control wild fires,” parliamentary secretary Mark Dreyfus said in a statement on Friday.
The ILC will be able to generate up to 20,000 carbon credits each year. CFI credits are expected to sell for less than the current $23-a-tonne fixed price but Fish River could still earn close to $500,000 annually. “The ILC’s carbon credits can be sold to big polluting businesses that need to offset their carbon price liability,” Mr Dreyfus said. “The extra income will be used to help conserve the significant biodiversity of the Fish River property, support indigenous jobs and training and investigate other investment opportunities.”
Historically around 70 per cent of the property would be burnt by uncontrolled fires each year. But in recent years that’s been cut to just three per cent by combining traditional knowledge with satellite tracking and mapping technology.
Carbon credits created under savanna-burning projects are Kyoto compliant and count towards Australia’s national emission-reduction targets.
link for above story http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/national/burning-savanna-creates-carbon-credit-cash/story-e6frfku9-1226509215115
I deal with similar situations at work, but with RF noise. If they had averaged the multiple images, rather than a ‘peak detection’ type function, it would have been a much different image.
What IS that south of South Korea?
Chinese navy ships patrolling the border of their seas?
Big wildfires in WA are pretty normal, it is a big place, 3.5 times the size of Texas with a population of only 2.4m. If the fires aren’t near where any lives or livestock then no-one worries about them too much. It is not like it is possible to do much about them.
I’m skeptical. You only have to fly over a thunderstorm to realize that one flash of lightning lights up the whole cloud and if the strike rate is high enough huge areas of convective cloud will appear to be lit up.
At 1:31 in the video the sea to the east and south of S Korea is lit up – phosphorescence?
Pointing a photomultiplier at the earth and integrating over time requires a lot more explanation than they have given: do fireflies show up?
Bushfires are “part of the weather” in most of Australia.
Most fires burn quickly but relatively “cold”, leaving plant (parts) below the surface (and bark) to regrow quickly. The situation is different in areas where periodic burning is suppressed. The high fuel load, usually consisting of litter containing large amounts of lipids (oils), increases the likelihood of a highly destructive and very rapid, hot fire that can sterilise even indigenous vegetation, preventing regrowth for many seasons.
Such fires tend to go unnoticed by the mainstream media. But when those fires hit towns populated by those “escaping” the city; melt the engine blocks of cars and burn everything that has been built to the ground, it’s suddenly an unusual event. In the past decade or two, preparing for severe bush fires has been obstructed by country town councils that appear to have become infested with feckless do-gooders; making regulations that e.g. ban fuel reduction burns; prevent homeowners from clearing trees in the proximity of their homes and removing loud town fire alarm sirens because they were too noisy. People have been imprisoned for daring to clear fire breaks. Such policies have resulted in deaths and loss of property.
When such man-made disasters occur, there are inquiries, commissions and reports with recommendations … but subsequent actions usually run counter to the recommendations. They are “forgotten” even though they are common sense. Legal processes against those whose actions or inactions exascerbated the impact of the fires are rare. They appear to be above the law.
I spent three weeks in the out back as a junior geologist doing field mapping back in 1986, I think it must have been October (ish) and I was on the north coast on the border of Wester Australia and the Northern Territories. While I was there, you could see wild fires every night in most directions. Mostly they were small areas burning at at any one time, and most were deliberately set to burn off dead grass to encourage the new growth. What surprised me, was although the fires would move through very quickly, you always ended up with a few old stumps and logs burning for up to a couple of days afterwards. We speculated that some of the bright spots you could see in the distance might be natural gas seeps burning, but we never investigated (we had other things to do) as I recall, the Australian geologist I was with referred to the night lights as ‘Ning Bings’
Duncan says:
December 8, 2012 at 6:56 am
“What IS that south of South Korea?
Chinese navy ships patrolling the border of their seas?”
Fisher boats attracting fish with spotlights.
Billy Liar says:
December 8, 2012 at 8:05 am
Not phosphorescence but squid fishing: http://www.panoramio.com/photo_explorer#view=photo&position=424&with_photo_id=51387339&order=date_desc&user=3673168
First looking at that I was saying, “What are all them people down there smoking?”
Old timers in the Ozarks used to talk about how tobacco was discovered in America and it used to be the only continent that was lit up.
“Back then people had a choice of continents. Smoking or Non-Smoking.”
Guess you have to be from the Ozarks. You don’t have to post this if you don’t want to.
Duncan;
Apart from cruise ships and fishing vessels, vessels under way at night have complete darkness on deck so that those on the bridge have proper night vision; thus they don’t show up on pictures like this. (The navigation lights are too dim to show up from space, and anyway are constructed to show only on a horizontal plane.)
Do NOT tell Al Gore about cloud-to-cloud lightning!
We will never hear the end of it.
His brain will equate incomplete combustion (and exhaust of non combusted gasoline from automobiles) at Earth’s surface, lofting into the upper troposphere, leading to increasing concentrations of combustible materials and add cloud-to-cloud lightning resulting in ignition.
A new prediction of death and horror and rain of fire and brimstone from Gorezilla. XD
Oh no! Don’t tell me we Aussies are responsible for global warming! Oh, the shame!
/sarc. 🙂
Pretty pictures. I’ve driven in the bush at night after a fire has gone through. The embers look magical, as though there is a city all around, yet you know for a fact there’s not another human soul for miles.
I’ve also seen how quickly nature springs back. Within days grasses are sprouting up and there is a green-sheen over everything. The kangaroos are okay, too, because they’re right back there eating it. You get a better appreciation of the majesty of nature when you live out bush.
Check out thunderstorms and lightning for Western Australia! Central and NW sectors of WA have experienced, and are are experiencing, an unusually active thunderstorm season for late November and early December, with above average storm activity over the (non-populated) areas lit up in the image. It would be very unusual for wildfires to be that extensvie and prolific without witness reports – and the resultant widespread smoke would be observable on the daytime satellite images – and it is not.
These areas look way to big to be bush fires, if they are. they would be the biggest bush fires in Australian history
These “photos” are NOT made with a camera. An observer from the space station would only see darkness and not get a photo like this even with a long exposure. They use very high sensitive detectors, like those used in trying to find galaxies at the edge of the universe, to make these “photos.” These sensors can detect light levels in the neighborhood of a few photons. Then they use this to tell us how much light/energy we are wasting. Another “true lie” that NASA tells us.
If you want to know how to reduce fire risks in Australia – just ask the Indigenous Australians.
As for earning carbon credits for what the have traditionally done is insane. A bit like paying oil companies for pumping co2 into wells when they have been doing it for almost 40 years now.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=enhanced-oil-recovery
As an old aussie, I put my money 99% on lightning flashes, 1% on bush fires. Take it from me, there isn’t that much out there to burn!