Vegetation Disturbance from the Gifford Fire

Vegetation loss due to the Gifford Fire in Central California can be seen in this comparison image from August 18, 2025. Swipe the center bar left and right to see how the confirmed vegetation disturbances, shown in yellow and red, from the OPERA Land Surface Disturbance layer on the left "A" side coincide with the red burned area in the shortwave infrared reflectance image on the right "B" side from the Multi-Spectral Instrument (MSI) aboard the Sentinel-2B platform.  

The OPERA Land Surface Disturbance (DIST-ALERT) imagery layer is a Level-3 (L3) product that maps per pixel vegetation disturbance (specifically, vegetation loss) detected when a change to the land surface occurs outside a historical norm. Vegetation disturbance is mapped when there is an indicated decrease in vegetation cover within a Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 (HLS) pixel. The spatial resolution is 30 m, and the displayed layer describes vegetation disturbance status based on confidence, magnitude of loss, and whether it is ongoing. 

Press "Play" in the lower left corner of the map above to see an animation of the changes in the OPERA Land Surface Disturbance layer between August 15 and 18. 

The changing colors on the map represent the three confidence levels: "first detection" in greens—loss detected in only the most recent observation; "provisional" in brown and orange—upon a second detection of vegetation loss; and "confirmed" in yellow and red—once there are sufficient loss detections to reach high confidence of disturbance. These are reported for both disturbances with <50% vegetation loss and those with ≥50% loss, whether diffuse across an entire pixel or just a portion of it. These labels persist as long as the anomalies continue to be detected. Once a location no longer has low vegetation cover, confirmed alerts are labeled as "finished," and the others are reset to no disturbance. This status is iteratively updated with each subsequent granule.

The input dataset for generating each product is the Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 (HLS) dataset. The OPERA Land Surface Disturbance (L3) imagery layer is available through the Observational Products for End-Users from Remote Sensing Analysis (OPERA) project.

Learn more about OPERA Land Surface Disturbance in Worldview's Land Surface Disturbance Tour Story. 

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