NASA website

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/fire_and_smoke.html

Funny, I keep thinking about writing something about my wonderful weekend over the 4th, but instead, back home in California, the smoke sucks out all my breath and dominates everything. This web site is amazing, with NASA images of the fires as they are happening. Seems as though NASA is helping out the state of california and the forest service with thermal imaging. If you look at the photos, you will see lots of cool 3d kinds of imagery that we are now using for soil survey.

Soil survey went through a huge period of change back in the 40's with the advent of readily available aerial photography, somewhat because of WWII. Instead of a plane table and surveying tools from the past, soil scientists used stereo pairs of black and white photos to view the landscape in 3d and draw soil boundaries. Now we use GIS, and the technology is exploding and the changes are exponential. It's an interesting period to be a mapping soil scientist, for sure, if you can handle rapid change. Some soils scientists are having trouble, others never had the opportunity to do it the old way so don't have a clue about the limitations of technology when it comes to the real world. But either way, the technology is incredibly cool, or in this case with the fires, hot.