Fire Event Data Suite Data Western US Archive

Introduction Fire Event Data Suite (FEDS) release for the accompanying paper Near Real-Time Indicators of Burn Severity in the Western U.S. from Active Fire Tracking. Base FEDS data were further post-processed for specific use in the manuscript. The entire workflow is documented in four notebooks:Orland_etal_postprocess_allfires - This notebook provides additional forward filling and merging on the base FEDS allfires objects Orland_etal_DataGeneration - Uses the post-processed data to generate the analysis ready data Orland_etal_DataValidation - Loads in and documents the validation process of the analysis ready data Orland_etal_DataAnalysis - Walks through the entire data analysis, including figure generation and reporting of all major findings in the publication. All data are based on allfires and allpixels objects from the forthcoming data release of CONUS-wide FEDS data. Current development status of FEDS data can found on the project repo. Data provided here were generated from version 1.2.1 of the project software. The project homepage can be found here. Background Data on the FEDS Algorithm The FEDS algorithm tracks wildfires using 375-m resolution data from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) active fire detections. At each half-daily time step, fire pixels are clustered together into groups based on spatial proximity and appended to an existing active fire event or assigned to a new one. This automated process continuously updates each fire’s attributes, outlines the fire perimeter, and identifies the active fire front in near real-time, following the most recent satellite data acquisition. A detailed description of the FEDS algorithm is provided in Chen et al., 2022. The FEDS algorithm applies an alpha hull algorithm to encapsulate a cluster of active fire observation within a given shape (Hantson et al., 2022; Pateiro-Lopez et al., 2019). The algorithm also decides where and when to merge different fire objects, depending on ecosystem-specific parameters.