Exploratory: generated automatically from the UmaTerra platforms' data; not independently validated or peer reviewed.
In August 2023 the McDougall Creek wildfire burned the slopes above West Kelowna, British Columbia. This story reads the same piece of land in four UmaTerra tools: what was there before, what the fire took, what two official maps say afterwards, and the climate ahead.
Loading the four platforms' numbers…
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.
Each platform asks in its own way. Naturametrics and climate-shift read circles around a point; Yvynation reads a protected area by its official boundary; Camposcope reads a parcel from the land registry. To compare them, all four look at the same place: the middle of the burn.
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada's Annual Crop Inventory classifies every 30 m pixel of the country each year: crops, but also forest, grassland and town. 2022 is the last picture before the fire.
The national forest monitoring system (NTEMS, Canadian Forest Service) dates every forested pixel in 2019 from three decades of Landsat. Young stands are the ones that burned or were cut before; those over a century old are what was left standing.
Hansen/GLAD marks, year by year since 2001, the 30 m pixels that lost their tree canopy, from any cause. Each column is one year inside the circle.
The fire record comes from MODIS (MCD64A1), in 500 m pixels. Coarse for a house, but a fire this size is exactly what it was built to see. Yvynation reads the park; Camposcope reads the parcel and three bands around it.
Here the maps disagree, and the disagreement teaches. The crop inventory has a class for burnt area, but it does not last; Hansen keeps the lost canopy for good.
Yvynation reads protected areas from Canada's register (CPCAD) by their official boundaries. Rose Valley Regional Park sits between the lake and the slopes, in the fire's path.
Camposcope reads parcels from ParcelMap BC, the provincial fabric, and sets them against three bands around them. On the fire's north-east edge, a parcel of Crown land shows how the burn spreads from the parcel into its neighbourhood.
climate-shift brings together the circle's land use, nine CMIP6 climate models and forty years of measured climate. The question is not whether it will burn again, but which changes this land is exposed to.
A projection does not say what one summer will be like: it 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. Three readings help picture that future: which world it is (the IPCC's global warming) and where that climate already exists today; how many days of extreme fire weather the place will have; and the climate class inside the circle, from an independent 1 km map.
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 out of the platforms' own services, with its source, scale and time of calculation.
Written with Claude Opus 5.5, by Anthropic, from the numbers the platforms computed: no number comes from the model. Versão em português.