The other night I was combing through news stories on the web looking for cities that were burning in California, and then plotting them on a map to get an idea of the extent of the situation. Once I plotted about a half dozen points, I connected all the points to see what the coverage looked like.

I then came across some GIS data produced by the Fire and Resource Assessment Program of California. The fire threat map and the fuel load map both indicated a high threat and a high fuel load in the exact positions that I had just previously mapped out. It was a pretty neat exercise. I would have posted some high-res maps that I made, but I am running out of web space.