Image of the week: Los Angeles wildfires

Watching our Earth from Space

This week’s image is of the devastating wildfires that have recently affected Los Angeles. The image was captured by one of the Copernicus Sentinel-3 satellites.

Last Updated

22 January 2025

Published on

13 January 2025

The fires have destroyed thousands of buildings, forced tens of thousands of people to leave their homes and caused the deaths of 24 people, with many people still missing.

The fires in the Palisades area have burned through more than 23,000 acres, while the Eaton fires have burnt over 14,000 acres.

Monitoring fires from space

In addition to the main image of the fires, the combined image below shows how the SLSTR instrument onboard Sentinel-3 is able to detect the fires and quantify their intensity. The benefit of Sentinel-3 sensors is underlined when the fire detection data is superimposed on the RGB image captured by the OLCI instrument onboard the same satellite. Colours of the circles represent the radiative power of individual fires (in megawatts)

The Fire Radiative Power product implemented by EUMETSAT, monitors the location and associated threat (i.e. total radiative power) of land and ocean hotspots detectable on our planet, in near real time (within 3 hours from sensing). This includes agricultural burning, wildfires, deforestation, tropical peatland fires, industrial gas flares, and volcanoes.