Exploratory: generated automatically from the UmaTerra platforms' data; not independently validated or peer reviewed.
On 7 January 2025, in the middle of a dry winter and under strong Santa Ana winds, a fire started in the Santa Monica Mountains above Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, and ran down to the sea through hills and neighbourhoods. This story measures it from orbit, asks how much of what burned was town, checks what the official maps recorded, and reads the climate ahead in climate-shift.
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measured by satellite or from the geometry itself. estimated projected by climate models, or a reading that depends on a threshold. missing a part that did not respond this time.
The other UmaTerra platforms (Naturametrics, Camposcope, Yvynation) do not cover the United States. This story runs on climate-shift, which does, and on satellite layers prepared for this page in Earth Engine.
The Annual National Land Cover Database (USGS) classifies every 30 m pixel of the lower 48 states each year since 1985. climate-shift reads it for any circle in the country.
A burn shows in the infrared: healthy leaves reflect near-infrared and absorb short-wave infrared, ash and bare soil do the opposite. The difference between the burn ratio before and after the fire (dNBR) gives the severity, in the bands the US Geological Survey uses.
Crossing the burn with the land-cover map of 2024 tells how much of the burned area was town and not hillside. The map is zoomed on Pacific Palisades.
The 2025 edition of the Annual NLCD already covers the year of the fire. The question is what a land-cover map can record of it.
MTBS (Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity, USFS and USGS) maps every large fire in the country since 1984. Each column is what burned inside this year's outline in one year.
For the United States climate-shift uses nine CMIP6 models downscaled by NASA (NEX-GDDP), their fire-weather index (NEX-GDDP-FWI), and forty years of measured climate. The question is which changes this land is exposed to, not whether it will burn again.
A projection compares two 30-year climates, 1985–2014 and 2041–2070, and each model is measured against its own past. climate-shift speaks of a hazard only when at least two-thirds of the models agree on the sign.
The decades-long trend is not everything: from one year to the next, El Niño and La Niña move rain and heat far more than it does. climate-shift reads the state now from NOAA's relative index (RONI, which does not mistake a warmer ocean for El Niño), groups the October–March seasons already measured here by phase, and then shifts those same seasons by the change projected for 2041–2070. It is an exploratory reading: few seasons per phase, and the models do not agree on how ENSO itself will change.
climate-shift also writes its result up in paragraphs, for readers who do not read charts.
Every number on this page came from Earth Engine or from climate-shift's own service, with its source and scale.
Written with Claude Opus 5.5, by Anthropic, from the numbers Earth Engine and climate-shift computed: no number comes from the model. Versão em português.