As you probably know,

... California is having what is probably the worst fire season in the past few centuries. It's bad enough that I check the local Air Quality Index before I go outside to do anything active. When the AQI get above 125, it definitely smells smoky, and above 150, you'll see small white ashes drifting down out of the heavy, scary, deep gray sky.

While it's easy to get the news about the fires, and easy to find information about the CURRENT extent of the fires, it's a little harder to find a kind of time-lapse of fire growth over the past several days.

Here's an image of the current fire map from ARCGIS:

The current state of the wildfires in the Bay Area. I'm in Palo Alto, at the X marked near the bottom of the Bay on the west side.

But there's no easy way to see what the fire was like 7 days ago. Of course, I can take a screenshot every day and construct a time-lapse image of the fires. (I should have started on Day 1!) That way I can see their rate of growth, their direction of growth, and spread.

But it's not trivial to find such an animated map. Can you help me with this week's SRS Challenge and locate one for us?

1. Can you find a time-lapse map of the growth of the current fires in the San Francisco Bay Area? (Roughly, the area shown in the map above.) Ideally, the animated map should go back to around August 16, 2020, the date the CZU Lightning Fire Complex was started by a sudden flurry of lightning strikes.

As always, let us know HOW you found the animated map? What strategies did you use to find it?

For the record, I have not yet found such a map. We might have to make it on our own.

Search on! (And stay healthy. I now have two reasons to wear a good mask.)