Cottonwood Ca Fire
201641,793 acresSouth Dakota
The Cottonwood Ca Fire burned 41,793 acres, about 65 square miles, across 2 counties. It began on October 16, 2016.
Watch how it happenedCottonwood Ca Fire · 2016
How it happened
Watch it burn in the order satellites saw it, coloured by how severely each place burned.
How severely it burned
Burn severity inside the final perimeter, classified from Landsat images taken before and after the fire.
| Severity | Share | Acres |
|---|---|---|
| Lowsurface fire, most trees survive | 81% | 34,006 |
| Unburned to lowislands inside the perimeter, little change | 5.2% | 2,191 |
| Increased greennessvegetation greener after the fire than before | 0.2% | 77 |
| Not mappedcloud, shadow or water in the satellite images | 13% | 5,519 |
Most of the area inside the perimeter burned at low severity or not at all.
Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (U.S. Geological Survey and USDA Forest Service). Classes come from the change in a Landsat burn index (dNBR) between images before and after the fire; acres are each class’s share of the fire’s mapped area.
Where it burned
Acres inside each county, measured from the satellite-mapped perimeter.
| Jackson County | SD | 41,687 |
| Pennington County | SD | 88 |
Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (USGS and U.S. Forest Service). Type recorded: Wildfire.