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8/12/2015 Smoke Blog Map Improvements

The map that displays on the top of the Oregon smoke blog recently received a few updates.  First, we are now able to display icons on the map that represent the temporary smoke monitors that are deployed when we get serious wildfire smoke events.  These temporary monitors are color coded by the Air Quality Index rating just like the state monitors but are represented with triangles rather than circles. (We've had that particular feature go on and off a few times today but we're working to get it stabilized.)
And the other feature that we've just added is a wildfire layer, well actually there are 2 options for wildfires but just one is turned on by default. The flame icons that show on the map by default represent "hot spot" locations detected by satellite. Many are wildfires but they also may be field burning or even urban fires on occasion.  On the plus side, these hot spots can be detected quite early before there's a firefighting team assigned to a wildfire incident. On the minus side, an older, smoldering wildfire fire may still have significant smoke emissions but be too cool to be picked up by the satellite.

The second option for seeing fire locations can be displayed by opening the "Layers" list and selecting "InciWeb Fires". This layer will display fires locations with little hard hat icons (see below).  Click on the hard hat to get a brief overview of the fire. (The title is "Washington Smoke Map" just because the Washington smoke blog was created first.)