CAPTION: This 2 hour 15 minute animation shows the development of large smoke plumes from brush fires on the western slope of the Rocky Montains in Utah, Northern Arizona, and Western Colorado. The image sequence begins in the mid afternoon on Monday, June 24, 1996 and consists of imagery obtained at a 15 minute interval.

Utah's Great Salt Lake is visible in the upper left of the images. The dry salt beds surrounding the lake show up as bright regions that contrast sharply with the dark water of the lake. To the east of the lake, the snow topped Uinta Mountains are another prominant feature of the imagery. In the lower portions of the image, Lake Powell shows up nicely along the Arizona/Utah border. An ambient wind from the southwest flows parallel to the ridge lines in Western Colorado and Eastern Utah, producing several lines of small convective clouds centered along the ridges. Although it's not clear when the fires actually began, the afternoon heat and southwestly winds cause a rapid expansion of the fires and dramatic increases in the size of the smoke plumes.

WARNING: This animation makes use of a sequential display of the component images making up a single, multiframe gif file. The file is only downloaded once, with the repeated display of the loop being performed from the local cache by the Browser. This animation approach requires Netscape 2.0 or equivalent.