The Timber fire has escaped into the Ventana wilderness, entering into Lion Creek and Big Sur River South Fork as I write this.  With drier, warmer conditions expected speed of growth is likely to increase, especially when reaching areas not burnt by Soberanes Wildfire in 2016. 

So I want to report on what Big Sur Trailmap is displaying on its 2D interactive map and 3D map. 

Aircraft IR (infrared) overflights provide daily (usually) perimeters of the burn extent - flight timing varies with CalFire and USFS aircraft used.  More frequent observations come from satellite IR hits, notably 3 NASA VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) polar-orbiting satellites with a nominal 375m resolution (varies with observation angle) - their passes are irregularly timed, typically with 4-5 per day. 

Currently the trailmap queries on-line sources for new perimeter and satellite data every hour - new data is downloaded, processed, and sent to the website.  Burn area is displayed as gray fill with darker border - clicking the border gives popup with date/time and burn acres.  Satellite hits are displayed as a dot colored by 3 age bins, as described in the burn Legend (must have controls displayed to see that link) plus a gray box showing hit size - clicking the dot gives popup with date/time, confidence, and border of hit area. 

For those using Google Earth, I also put an updated GoogleEarth KMZ file with perimeter and satellite hits:
Download
Timber Fire Google Earth "network link" file


Finally, I send an email notification whenever perimeter or satellite data is updated (also reports change in 0-6hr hits and acreage respectively) - you can get on (or off) that list by emailing me at .  Typically I get 5-6 emails per day alerting me to changes so I can check out the map.