Wisps of Disaster, Seen From Space

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The video shows three geysers that gush eastward from the mountains of New Mexico and a sheet of brown that spills down from the north.

What it represents is much more destructive.

There are two devastating events happening in the Western United States in the time-lapse image. The first is a wildfire outbreak in northern New Mexico that started last month and has intensified in the past two weeks. There is a dust storm in Colorado.

As a result of climate change, the types of natural disasters are becoming more severe and frequent.

According to the NASA Earth Observatory, there were seven large fires burning in New Mexico. Four of them are shown in the satellite image. The westernmost fire is the Cerro Pelado fire. The Cooks Peak fire covers 59,000 acres. The Calf Canyon and Hermits Peak fires merged around April 22 into one huge, 160,000-acre blaze.

The area that is burning in the satellite image is larger than Indianapolis. Thousands of people have been forced to leave their homes in Las Vegas, N.M., an hour east of Santa Fe, because of the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon fire.

Human activity has made wildfires worse in the West. It is a major contributor. Climate change has caused the American Southwest to be the driest it has been in 12 centuries.

The fires in northern New Mexico are being caused by wind. The Hermits Peak Fire started as a prescribed burn, meaning a fire set intentionally, under controlled conditions, to clear out dry vegetation and reduce the risk of larger, uncontrollable fires, but gusty, unpredictable winds blew it out of control.

The dust storm in Colorado was caused by high winds.

The National Weather Service in Colorado said on Friday that visibility is dropping to zero and winds are gusting to 50-60 m.p.h.

Satellite imagery shows how widespread disasters can be. Dust particles were carried across hundreds of miles of southeastern Colorado, western Kansas, and the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles by winds during the dust storm.

People with underlying lung or heart diseases are particularly at risk of being harmed by fine particulate matter. That applies to dust, smoke, soot, and other things.

The sun was red as far east as New York City because of air quality warnings caused by wildfires last summer. In January, researchers found that dangerous levels of smoke and ozone were increasing over much of the Western United States.