Images captured from orbit show disturbing views of smoke billowing from California's wildfires

An astronaut aboard the International Space Station took this photo of a towering pyrocumulus cloud rising from the Ferguson Fire near Yosemite National Park. Make sure to click on the image and then click again to view close-up details. (Source: NASA Earth Observatory) When California's 2018 wildfire season is over — if it actually ends — it may well be remembered as the summer of the "new normal." That is, of course, the meme that has exploded across news and social media this summer as an extraordinary series of wildfires has scorched vast swaths of California. I'm not actually sure why the meme didn't take hold last year, which was both the deadliest and most destructive year for wildfires in the state's history, with at least 41 people killed and 9,393 structures destroyed. All told, wildfires scorched 1,266,224 acres of the state in 2017 — an area approaching half the size of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. In any case, I'll save the concept of "new normal" for a future post. Here, I thought I would simply offer a selection of compelling remote sensing imagery of still-burning California wildfires, with some statistics and science woven in for context. Let's start with the image at the top of this post. It was taken by an astronaut aboard the International Space Station on Aug. 2. It shows a towering column of smoke billowing up from the Ferguson Fire near Yosemite National Park. As of today (Aug. 8), the blaze has scorched 94,992 acres and killed two people. It is now the largest fire on record in the Sierra National Forest. Click on the image to open it separately, and then zoom in on the column of smoke by clicking again. The white tops of the smoke tower are characteristic of a pyrocumulus cloud. Clouds like this can form as air currents billowing upward from wildfires carry ash and water vapor above the atmospheric "boundary layer" — the lowest part of the troposphere — and high into the atmosphere.