Rapid remote sensing assessment of landscape-scale impacts from the California Camp Fire
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Ecosystem Science, Spatial and Geographic Information Science
- Keywords
- wildfire, climate change, remote sensing, risk management, data science
- Copyright
- © 2019 Chambers et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2019. Rapid remote sensing assessment of landscape-scale impacts from the California Camp Fire. PeerJ Preprints 7:e27654v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27654v1
Abstract
The Camp Fire rapidly spread across a landscape in Butte County, California, toward the city of Paradise in the early morning hours of 8 November 2018. Here we provide a set of initial tools and analyses that are useful to a variety of stakeholders, including: (1) a visualization app for GOES 16 data and the surrounding landscape showing the rapid spread of the fire from 6:37-10:47 a.m. local time; (2) processed Landsat 8 images for before, during, and after the fire, along with a tool for visualizing regional impacts; (3) a timeline of fire spread from ignition over the first four hours; and (4) a description of a potential early warning app that could make use of existing data, visualization, and analysis tools, to provide additional information for effective evacuation of communities threatened by rapidly moving wildfires. Using these tools we estimate that, over the first hour, the Camp Fire was consuming ~200 ha/minute of vegetation with a linear spread rate of 14 km over the fire’s first 25 minutes, or ~33km/hr. We briefly discuss broader use of remote sensing and geospatial analysis for fire research and risk management.
Author Comment
This rapid analysis following the California 2018 Camp Fire provides a number of tools, visualizations, and geospatial analyses useful to a broad range of stakeholders.