Fire Behavior Assessment Team: in-fire videos

This data publication contains in-fire video collected by the Fire Behavior Assessment Team (FBAT) on a subset of wildland fires in the United States from 2003-2019. FBAT collects pre- and post-fire fuels and tree data along with fire behavior measurements on wildland fires. FBAT is an interagency group of primarily Forest Service employees with both monitoring and fireline qualifications which collects pre- and post-fire fuels and tree data along with fire behavior measurements on wildland fires. Logistics (proximity to instrumentation/crew members), funding, fire activity, and monitoring questions influenced the geographic regions and fires where sampling was attempted, for instance, fuel treatments recorded in the Forest Service Activity Tracking System (FACTS), as well as tree mortality areas, were each targets for FBAT sampling in the past. This publication includes the full in-fire videos (60-85 minutes) for multiple plots on 16 different wildland fires. Also included are multiple short, 30-60 second video clips, taken from the full videos, to highlight the variation in fire behavior observed at each plot. The concept behind these short video clips was to give viewers several samples of the typical fire behavior observed at each plot because the full length videos can be quite long.
These data are collected by the FBAT team to document how fire burns in the plots sampled. Estimated fire behavior properties such as fire rate of spread, flame length, flame angle, and fire type can be obtained from these video data. In-fire video of fire spread can also document other characteristics of fire behavior, such as movement through spotting, tree torching events, ember production, and fire whirl development. Some observations relating to various stages of flaming and smoldering combustion can be made depending on the level of smoke obscuring the view, as can gross observations of smoke production.
This package was originally published on 08/03/2021. On 04/17/2024, videos for the 2013 Rim Fire plots 1-4 were added to this publication (see Process Steps for additional information).