Live Satellite Imagery
We just added live satellite imagery from GOES 16 and 17: https://caltopo.com/map.html#ll=40.07807,-113.81836&z=6&b=mbt&o=goes_0&n=1
CalTopo has a dual mission. Normally, we try to be “the right tool for a good day”, helping you plan and execute amazing adventures in the backcountry. Sometimes, particularly for professional users, we become “the right tool on a bad day”, helping provide situational awareness during chaotic emergencies.
When fires broke out across the western US, we decided to pause our development roadmap for a few weeks to work on “bad day” features. One area of focus was on those using SARTopo to plan fire evacuations, and we’ve silently released a few changes to support those efforts by better managing large datasets and lots of users.
Below image: Creek Fire in California on the afternoon of 9/5, live GOES imagery with live GOES fire detection overlaid.
We’ve also been improving our public fire data, beginning with the recently-released GOES fire detection layer (seen in the above photo). Adding live GOES imagery was the next logical step, but it proved to be more difficult than we expected. However after two weeks of hard work, it’s here! The imagery is updated every 5 minutes, and as with GOES fire detections, CalTopo will auto-refresh the layer to ensure that you are always looking at the most recent image.
It’s good that you mentioned fires here and it’s great that you are working on this. This is a very serious matter. I am still interested in this topic and wanted to share an up-to-date article on forest fire prevention. Especially cool that with wildfire prevention helps EOSDA Forest Monitoring and how they do it.