How big is the Smoke House Creek wildfire?

For the few ones who are interested in Synthetic Aperture Radar interferometry, it is well known that the main criterion of feasibility is coherence and that coherence losses reveal structural changes of a scene at wavelength scale.

For the few other ones only interested in the title of this note, let's summarize saying that playing with radar images it is possible to observe structural changes within a scene. And, since a wildfire induces strong local structural changes, these latter ones can be observed, allowing to localize burned zones.

Like everybody I heard about the Smoke House Creek wildfire in Texas and I read some news stating it is the second biggest wildfire in US history.

I used two #ESA #COPERNICUS #Sentine1 SAR images acquired on February 15 and 27 to put structural changes in evidence through the so-called coherence channel to evidence the burned area. The image here above shows thus the fire extension on February 27.

Without a scale, it is quite difficult to have a good idea of the fire extension. So, putting this image in a cartographic representation is certainly better. In such cartographic representation it is then possible to estimate the East-West fire extension to about 140km!

Even with a scale, it is hard to imagine such an extent. So, to help having a better idea of how big is a 140km fire extent, I added Belgium borders in this cartographic representation.

This raise the question: Is the Smoke House Creek wildfire so big or is Belgium a so tiny country?