6/11/14 7:15 am Infrared Map of Two Bulls Fire

Good morning Bend!!  Have another infrared map for you this morning.  You will see at the bottom left that this heat sensing satellite flyover was done a bit after 9 pm Tuesday evening, which gives us the latest map of the fire - at least the latest map showing heat.  The red dots are areas of heat while the stripes are areas of more intense heat.  It's fairly obvious the fire is burning primarily on the western edge.

Wednesday IR map!

You might not be aware of this, but we don't have real time maps of our fires.  We get maps three ways:  either we do an infrared map by flying late at night between 11 pm and 2 am normally in a plane equipped with infrared sensing equipment or we use the data from a satellite that does the same thing as it passes over twice a day.

Those kinds of flights take some time for map creation because we have to download the data and that can take a bit. Or we use one of the fire's helicopters with a GPS and fly the perimeter. Obviously, that uses a helicopter which we may need for fighting the fire, so we can't do it a lot.

But it's important to know fire progress information is not as readily available as, say, watching a hurricane move along the coast on the Weather Channel.  In fire, we don't have that capability.

 But, not to worry, the firefighters on the ground certainly know where the fire is, where its going and what it's doing. But they are pretty busy during the day and

their first priority is protecting your community, not making us maps!  So we try for once a day.  Just thought you might want to know!