Habitat Destruction in Mexico

Chuck Vaughn aa6g at aa6g.org
Wed May 17 12:32:09 EDT 2000


List,

Habitat destruction is a popular topic on this list and certainly a
serious problem. Besides lepidoptera, a seemingly completely different
interest of mine is weather satellite reception. With the recent high
profile fire in Los Alamos the discussion on a weather satellite list
turned to the creation of false color images that highlight fires.

Recently I created one of these to see the Los Alamos fire. Part of
this included a good portion of Mexico. I'm not a satellite interpretation
expert but there appeared to be hundreds of fires burning in the western
Sierra Madre of Mexico. A couple dozen showed obvious smoke plumes.
You may download the image and view it if you like.

ftp://shell3.ba.best.com/web2/aa6g/mexico.jpg  (400KB)

Maybe there are a few on this list familiar with Mexico. What is going
on down there? This looks like habitat destruction on a mass scale. Images
of the western U.S. and Canada show no such fire activity....except for
those in N.M and AZ.....and there are only a few red dots.

To help in your interpretation of this false colorimage, red is anything
that is warm. Red land does not mean it's on fire, only red dots I presume
to be fires. Green highlights vegetation. Blue is water and also highlights
smoke and haze. Cyan is clouds.

Is the Monarch overwintering site in this image? If not I can probably get 
one that shows it.

Chuck Vaughn <aa6g at aa6g.org>


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