Realized I was believing fake satellite images for months

I was dead sure that the 2023 wildfire maps from that popular tracker were legit until I compared the smoke patterns with a NOAA weather radar from the same day. The timing was off by 6 hours and the plume direction was wrong. Has anyone else cross-checked these against official sources?

3 comments

3 Comments

fiona9853d ago

NOAA radar archives are actually pretty easy to pull up if you know where to look. I caught a different wildfire map last summer showing a burn zone that the official USFS perimeter data had as completely unburned. The whole thing was basically an AI generated image with fake timestamps pasted on it. Makes you wonder how many of those "real time" disaster trackers are just feeding off each other without any actual verification.

michael_jenkins392d ago

Totally agree @fiona985, feels like everything from news feeds to weather apps is just copying each other now without checking facts.

young.kim2d ago

Tbh that NOAA tip is gold. I once saw a fake moon landing photo my uncle swore was real.