As we begin to learn today about individual lives lost and lives impacted by loss of their homes in the Bay Area's wine country and beyond — where upwards of 15 wildfires are burning concurrently many sparked almost simultaneously on Sunday night — here's a macro-level picture of what it looks like from space. This NASA image, labeled with 11 of those of fires, illustrates the huge plumes of smoke drifting offshore, and how that smoke is making it down to San Francisco where air quality remains poor today amid hazy skies.

The image, taken on Monday, is explained like so by NASA:

NASA's Aqua satellite collected this natural-color image with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, MODIS, instrument on October 09, 2017. Actively burning areas (hot spots), detected by MODIS’s thermal bands, are outlined in red. Each hot spot is an area where the thermal detectors on the MODIS instrument recognized temperatures higher than background.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the number of confirmed deaths in the fires had risen to 15, with two more added from Sonoma County. Nine of the victims appear to have been those who either did not evacuate or were unable to evacuate in time from the fast-moving Tubbs Fire in northern Santa Rosa, which began around 10 p.m. Sunday and quickly became a 20,000+-acre blaze thanks to high-speed, dry winds coming out of the west.

Two victims, an elderly couple unable to evacuate, died in the Atlas Fire in Napa County, three have died in the Redwood Complex Fire in Mendocino, and one perished in the Cascade Fire in Yuba County.

All previous coverage of the North Bay fires on SFist.