Two fires, one week.

Two fires, one week. A fire that began near Saumos on 22 July has burned close to 30,000 hectares of Gironde, the worst France has faced this century. 110,000 people were evacuated there and 31,000 more in Landes. Seven communes on the edge of Bordeaux were cleared pre-emptively, though the front itself never came closer than 21.5 kilometres to the city. In Spain, three fires in Toledo, Madrid and Ávila merged overnight into one front roughly eight kilometres long. 63,000 evacuated or confined. The data carries something the headlines did not. Gironde peaked on 24 July and has been receding since. Madrid is still growing. How it was made. Every dot is a real thermal detection, not an animation. 11,198 of them, gathered by three VIIRS satellites over 63 hours and published free by NASA FIRMS. They arrive in the exact order the satellites found them, so the shape of the front, the direction it travels and the moment it jumps are facts rather than choices. Colour carries fire radiative power, scaled to each fire's 95th percentile so the hot leading edge separates from the dying rim. The fiercest single detection burned at 1,489 MW. The ground is elevation data for the coastline and terrain, and OpenStreetMap for water, forest and roads. The Landes pine is drawn from 38,000 separate polygons, which is why it reads patchy. That is how it is mapped, not how it grows. The sound comes from the same detections. One swell per satellite overpass, 39 in all. The silences are the eleven-hour gaps between passes. Nothing was added. Built in Remotion. 4K, 9:16, 60fps. Sources: NASA FIRMS, © OpenStreetMap contributors. . . . #wildfire #dataviz #nasa #climate #gironde