Fire Data Sources

Many sources of weather, terrain, and fuel data for initialization, assimilation, and verification are freely available through public sites, many in the form of files viewable in Google Earth. Fire ignition tim/location data and imagery of fire extent at later times for specific incidents is still generally in the form of custom datasets where research or suppression teams were available to collect it.

Surface weather data

• The Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System (MADIS) http://madis.noaa.gov/ compiles surface weather data from many networks (http://madis.noaa.gov/network_info.html).

• Mesowest http://mesowest.utah.edu/index.html Also supports layers with fire info.

• Remote Automated Weather Station (RAWS) data http://raws.wrh.noaa.gov/roman/

• METAR, the international standard code format for hourly surface weather observations, data are available at http://weather.noaa.gov/weather/metar.shtml

• NOAA National Climate Data Center land based data http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/land.html

Vertical profiles of atmospheric properties

• Atmospheric soundings http://weather.uwyo.edu/upperair/sounding.html

• Atmospheric profiler data http://weather.uwyo.edu/upperair/profiler/ (not working currently)

• NOAA National Climate Data Center Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/igra/index.php

3D Weather Data

• The NOAA National Operational Model Archive and Distribution System (NOMADS) http://nomads.ncdc.noaa.gov/

• NOAA National Center for Environmental Prediction model products ftp://ftpprd.ncep.noaa.gov/pub/data/nccf/com/

NARR

Description

• North American Regional Reanalysis http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.narr.html
  • 8-times, Daily and Monthly means for 1979/01/01 to present, 32km resolution
  • Converted from GRIB to NetCDF4 (HDF5) as of 2016/02/11

Data access

• http://nomads.ncdc.noaa.gov/data/narr
• ftp://ftp.cdc.noaa.gov/Datasets/NARR

Fuel Maps

• LandFire http://landfire.cr.usgs.gov

10-hr Dead Fuel Moisture

• Remote Automated Weather Station (RAWS) data http://raws.wrh.noaa.gov/roman/

Live Fuel Moisture

• http://wfas.net based on NVDI data

Fire Ignition Time and Location Data

• Custom

Fire Perimeters

• Geospatial Multi-Agency Coordination (GEOMAC) http://www.geomac.gov/
• Incident Information System http://inciweb.nwcg.gov/

Fire Detection

• Firemapper http://firemapper.sc.egov.usda.gov/activefiremaps.php
• Latest MODIS from Forest Service http://activefiremaps.fs.fed.us/data/kml/conus_latest_AFM_bundle.kml
• Modis raw data ftp://152.61.133.5/MOLT/MOD14.005 Tera, ftp://152.61.133.5/MOLA/MOD14.005 Aqua satelite

Fire Location and Intensity Data

• Satellite fire detection from FireMapper by the NASA Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and VIIRS
• VIIRS products