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

Three-dimensional 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/

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

• Custom

Fire Ignition Time and Location Data

• Custom

Fire Perimeters

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

Fire Location and Intensity Data

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