VIIRS Nightfire Captures a Short-lived Thermal Spike after the Ras Laffan Incident
VIIRS Nightfire Captures a Short-lived Thermal Spike after the Ras Laffan Incident
PAYNE INSTITUTE COMMENTARY SERIES: COMMENTARY
June 24, 2026
On Sunday evening, June 21, 2026, reports described an explosion at Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City, specifically at the Barzan gas processing facility. QatarEnergy and news reports attributed the incident to a technical accident during restart operations, with 13 fatalities and 66 injuries reported [1]. The approximate time circulated in secondary reports is around 10:30 PM local time in Qatar, or about 19:30 UTC [2]. That time should be treated as approximate; the official language reported in several accounts refers more generally to the evening of June 21.
The time series of the VIIRS Nightfire detections [3] over Ras Laffan for the nights around the incident shows a distinct radiative-heat spike during the first detected overpass later that night. The spike is short-lived: later overpasses in the same sequence show much weaker or no comparable high-RH signal.
The Barzan context polygon was built as an approximate area-of-interest around the publicly mapped Barzan Gas Plant in Ras Laffan. The map anchor used for digitizing was the public OSM-derived Barzan Gas Plant listing at 25.91595°N, 51.48482°E, identified as OpenStreetMap way 225011395 and tagged as landuse=industrial [4]. The resulting polygon is used only as a visual facility-context overlay, not as an authoritative boundary or damage map. Public QatarEnergy LNG material describes Barzan as a gas facility supplying pipeline gas to local industry and power generation, with associated products including ethane, condensate, LPG and sulphur [5].
In the 3D visualization [Timelapse video], each fitted VIIRS Nightfire detection is plotted at its pixel-center location on an Esri satellite basemap. Column height and color are scaled by fitted radiative heat, with a fixed global normalization across the full time window. This prevents each frame from being independently rescaled and makes the short-lived high-RH overpass stand out clearly against earlier and later detections. The blue polygon marks the approximate Barzan facility footprint for spatial context.
The reported incident time was approximately 22:30 local Qatar time, or about 19:30 UTC, on June 21. The strongest VIIRS Nightfire anomaly was detected in the first clear post-incident overpass at about 21:29 UTC, roughly two hours after the reported explosion time.
Later VIIRS overpass at 22:15 UTC on June 21, about 45 minutes after the strongest post-incident detection. Using the same global RH scale, the remaining columns are much smaller, showing that the high-intensity thermal anomaly observed earlier had already faded substantially.
REFERENCES
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/qatar-reports-explosion-factory-ras-laffan-no-injuries-or-leak-reported-2026-06-21/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
[2] https://cryptobriefing.com/qatar-ras-laffan-explosion-injures-dozens/
[3] https://eogdata.mines.edu/products/vnf/
[4] https://mapcarta.com/W225011395
[5] https://www.qatarenergylng.qa/english/Operations/Domestic-Market?utm_source=chatgpt.com
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Mikhail Zhizhin
Research Associate, Earth Observation Group, Payne Institute for Public Policy, Colorado School of Mines
Mikhail Zhizhin, M.Science in mathematics from the Moscow State University in 1984, Ph.D. in computational seismology and pattern recognition from the Russian Acad. Sci. in 1992. Research positions from 1987 to 2012 in geophysics, space research and nuclear physics at Russian Acad. Sci., later at NOAA and CU Boulder. Currently he is a researcher at the Earth Observation Group at Colorado School of Mines. His applied research fields evolved from high performance computing in seismology, geodynamics, terrestrial and space weather to deep learning in remote sensing. He is developing new machine learning algorithms to better understand the Nature with Big Data.
Morgan Bazilian
Director, Payne Institute and Professor of Public Policy, Colorado School of Mines
Morgan Bazilian is the Director of the Payne Institute and a Professor of public policy at the Colorado School of Mines. Previously, he wD.as lead energy specialist at the World Bank. He has over two decades of experience in the energy sector and is regarded as a leading expert in international affairs, policy and investment. He is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
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