Arc of Fires in the U.S. West

​By a staff reporter :


As August 2021 came to an end, 42,647 fires had scorched 4,879,574 acres across the United States in 2021—close to the ten-year average for the first eight months of a year, according to statistics from the National Interagency Fire Center. But among the 83 fires still actively burning on August 31, some were especially fierce; two of them had crossed the crest of the Sierra Nevada for the first time in recent record-keeping.

The largest blazes burned in Northern California, most notably the Caldor and Dixie fires, which together have scorched nearly 1 million acres (1,500 square miles) so far. Smoke from the Caldor fire near Lake Tahoe is visible in the image above, acquired on the afternoon of August 30, 2021, with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. Between ignition on August 14 and the time of the image, the fire had burned more than 170,000 acres. The fire perimeter was 14 percent contained as of September 1.