We’ve got some High Resolution Satellite images of the fires that have been burning across Southern California for the past 5 days. (Images were taken over the past two days.) As of now there have been over 900,000 forced evacuations, over 1,600 homes have been destroyed, and 500,000 acres have been burned down stretching from Santa Barbara to the Mexican Border. Many who have not yet been asked to evacuate are leaving due to the poor air quality. Both Governor Schwarzenegger and President Bush have declared a state of emergency and federal aid is being provided.

As for the images, they have been taken by NASA’s MODIS Rapid Response System. The first image at the top was taken yesterday (10/24/07) and the two images below were taken October 22nd (left) and October 23rd (right). To save server load, we’ve only placed the low resolution images in the thumbnails, however if you would like a copy of the full resolution images, save the zip file provided below.

Download: california-fires-2007.zip
Links: California Wild Fires Of October 2007 (wiki)
Related: Hurricane Katrina Satellite Images

“Yahoo! has acquired global map data and medium resolution images, which lets users find and see cities, towns, and major land feature in the world, [...] It’s a logical extension of Yahoo!’s recent product enhancements that included multi-point driving directions and improved zooming technology.” – Yahoo Spokesman.

Although they may lag behind in imagery, one feature Yahoo offers that others do not is multi-point directions. With multi-point directions a user can set not only point A and B, a start and end, but instead as many destinations as they’d like (C, D, E, etc.). Yahoo also offers a feature called “round-trip,” which is quiet different from reverse directions. With reverse directions, if the user has set the first, second and third locations, the standard application will only flip the exact same directions. However, the new innovative “round-trip” feature, Yahoo Maps will find new and closer directions if possible to get the driver back to the origin from their final destination without needing to go through mid-destinations again.

Links: Yahoo Maps Beta | Yahoo Maps
Related: Google Maps | MSN Maps