Burning Pixels

On the road again

2010-02-23T20:23:00.002-07:00

One of the problems working so closely with USGS-EROS is that on occasion I have to make site visits to their facility. We have an annual MTBS meeting between the two centers and it's always in February. The problem is that we rotate locations, one year in SLC and the next at EROS. In Sioux Falls.

It's cold in Sioux Falls in February!

This is my fourth trip to Sioux Falls: once in August, once in September, and twice in February. I don't mind the city or visits at all, but I could do without the 4 degrees I faced after dinner tonight.

In my capacity at my current job, I've had to make visits to Sioux Falls (twice) and Duluth, MN, in February. Brrr.

In other news, I was handed a promotion last week at work. After hearing the responsibilities of the new position, it became clear that it was no change from what I've already been doing for a year but wasn't compensated or recognized as such. I don't say that to be a whiner; rather, I say that to mean that my day-to-day activities won't change at all. I just get more money now. My official job title is now "Post-fire Mapping Group Leader" at RedCastle Resources.

Ho Hum

2010-01-31T15:50:00.002-07:00

It's been nice not having to map any active fires since October, 2009, when I was asked to map the Sheep Fire in California for the BAER team. After looking over my data for 2009, I noticed that I mapped my first fire (in CONUS) in March and my last in October. In reality, 2009 was "Driving Miss Daisy" when compared to 2006 - 2008's "Fast and Furious."

During the off season, I focus most my time on MTBS (Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity). I wish MTBS wasn't so huge because I rarely get time to pursue some research and applications ideas pertinent to BAER. For example, I've been trying to find ways to help BAER teams and Forests fulfil their responsibility to monitor BAER treatments and burn scars for at least 3 years. There is some great work out there by people like Pete Robichaud relating to how certain treatments work in terms of tons of runoff / acre in control (untreated) sites as well as those with various treatments. Pete and his crew do great work for the BAER community and that work affects what happens in terms of treatments all the time.

I'm more interested in landscape-scale treatment monitoring. This is apropos since I don't get to do the same field work Pete does and my expertise is in remote sensing. One way to leverage the technology is to capture imagery of burn scars during their growing seasons following the burn. I did a project a few years ago comparing vegetation response on the Cerro Grande Fire burn scar annually for 5 years. I compared areas heavily treated by BAER teams versus the natural greenup and die off of land that wasn't burned. Incidentally, we found that in areas treated by BAER teams, the vegetation greened up faster than those areas without any treatment but after 5 years, you couldn't really see any difference. In that case, the treatments did their job: slow immediate runoff and debris while letting nature take it's course.

Recently, a request came in to help track greenup during a single growing season on the Basin/Indians Complex. The local land manager was interested in not only when things greened up after the fire, but whether any greenup occurred during the year. If you capture a snapshot in time, you get a picture as to what is happening at that very moment. However, if you capture an image in August, for example, you may have some shrubs that are green and providing cover, but all the spring grasses are long dead. That's not a bad thing, though. Grasses that grow but then die off still provide ground cover and that information was desired by the land managers.

I captured 11 Landsat (30m) images during 2009 over this 2008 fire and created an NDVI (Normalized Differenced Vegetation Index) for each image. This provided a look at the vegetation vigor for each image. Then I did an overlay and captured the maximum NDVI value for each image and made a new layer showing where the vegetation was green sometime -- anytime -- between March and September, 2009.

It was a pretty cool layer and helps the locals quickly determine where there is no canopy or ground cover, even after a full growing season. The next step will be to overlay BAER treatments on these GIS layers to see if treatments really helped or hindered any growth.

Going East Again

2009-11-21T21:26:00.003-07:00

I'm trying to decide whether to continue this blog or not. The problem is that I don't blog from work and that's when I typically have something to say about work! Fire season in the United States is over so I'm not actively supporting those fellas. This year was relatively slow; I mapped 63 fires (average is 66) that burned about 582k acres (average is well over a million). I was super busy for about a month and a half but other than that, I was able to focus on other things at work.

I am traveling (my seventh trip this year) to Savannah, GA, the week after Thanksgiving to attend the Assoc. of Fire Ecology conference. This is usually a good conference, but the timing and cost is pretty ridiculous. The conference is hosting workshops the first day, Monday, Nov. 29. We, meaning the MTBS folks, decided to teach a course on how to use MTBS data as one of these workshops. That's fine and all, but that means we have to be ready to start Monday morning at 8am. In Georgia. That means we have to travel across the country with a stop in Atlanta (busiest airport in the world) the weekend after Thanksgiving. I'm flying out next Saturday just to be sure we don't have travel problems. Preparing for this workshop has been long and tiring with a lot of course material creation and testing. I'll be happy when this is over.

I do like this time of year at work, though, because the office gets quiet and it's easy to get lots of work done.

Out in the field!

2009-09-01T21:55:00.005-06:00

I swear I've been busier in the last 4 weeks than I have been in two months. With a long, wet spring this year, the fire season has been compacted into August and now into September. Lots of fires lately and even some huge puppies: LaBrea and Station.

Last week I had the opportunity to leave the busy office and do some field work. I visited the 2008 Cold Springs Fire outside Trout Lake, WA. Our purpose was to collect CBI (composite burn index) data on around 40 field plots. Me and a co-worker from my office met up with the godfathers of CBI (Nate Benson and Carl Key) and some Gifford Pinchot National Forest employees for the week.

The fire burned on the slopes of 12,000' Mt. Adams, one of the major volcanic peaks along the Cascades (think of Rainier, Hood, and St. Helens). In our travels back and for from our motel to the field, we noticed this property for sale. It's 1.77 acres with Trout Creek running along the back of the property, septic system already installed, and city services available for use. This picture shows the view from the property looking north towards Mt. Adams. Great property if you want to thrown down $325,000 and live in the shadow of an active volcano!

Oh, another thing: on our first day of the trip, we attended a meeting in Hood River, OR with the Mt. Hood and Gifford Pinchot NFs. I gave an hour-long talk about geospatial tools available for fire suppression, emergency rehab, and long term monitoring. As soon as I finished, one of the guys in the audience stood up and offered a statement and gifts. He offered a Certificate of Merit signed by the Mt. Hood National Forest Supervisor, as well as a coffee table book about Mt. Hood. Then a guy from the Gifford Pinchot NF stood up and gave me a hat with the Gifford Pinchot centennial emblem on it. It was completely unexpected, yet very much appreciated. The funny thing is that I've really only mapped about 3 fires between the two forests in the last 5 years.

Big Pole Fire

2009-08-21T08:19:00.002-06:00

The Big Pole fire about an hour west of here is out and quiet. I mapped it last week and sent the data to the BAER team. Here's an example of how I mapped the severity. When I got the satellite imagery, I edited the Incident perimeter and cut 2,000 acres off their number. They had been pretty liberal with counting unburned acres and I think I had a better source for a more accurate perimeter delineation.

Overall, the fire wasn't that severe. You can see that most the high severity corresponds with the north-facing, more densely vegetated slopes. This is pretty common. More fuel = hotter fire = longer residence time = higher soil burn severity. You can also see the 12,000-foot Deseret Peak in the back right of the picture.

Smoke is in the air

2009-08-10T09:22:00.004-06:00

I found them...
Looks like fire season has finally heated up and I'm getting lots of requests. This won't be a banner year for acres mapped, but I'll end up mapping plenty of fires. The really big fires this year are in Alaska (multiple 100k+ fires, in fact I counted 7 fires that have burned > 100k acres plus a few more in the 80 - 90k range). We even had a 45,000 acre fire just west of Salt Lake City last week that I've been asked to map, which I'll do as soon as the skies clear up and we snap a picture of the burn scar with a satellite.

The weird thing is that fires are still burning in the Southwest. Their fire season usually runs from April - July 4, which is when the monsoon season starts. Well, they had a very short monsoon season this year and my contacts down there are reporting things have dried up again and are burning.

I also got a request to map a fire in North Carolina called the Carolina Bay Fire. It burned about 2,000 acres right on the coast near the Havelock, NC. It's nice to map a fire somewhere besides the west, too!

Where are you, fires?

2009-06-29T22:37:00.002-06:00

It's been quiet on the wildfire front. Historically, Arizona and New Mexico are the areas I map fires in first. They burn between May and July 4, when the monsoon season typically starts. Well, July 4 is this weekend and I've mapped 3 fires in AZ and NM, and only 1 was an actual wildfire where they did emergency rehab. The other two were wildland fire use fires I mapped as favors for people. The only other fire I've mapped was Jesusita, just outside Santa Barbara.

Last year at this time, Northern California was a-blazin'. Remember the June 20 storm? They had 1,200 fires burning at once. There are three nationwide right now. Luckily, I have plenty of other work to keep me busy.

Popular Mechanics

2009-06-04T23:03:00.003-06:00

A few years ago we were approached by the National Geographic for an article they were doing on wildfires in the Western United States. They wanted to include a side-bar section on technology, mapping, remote sensing, and wildfires. I was stoked about this because it meant I got to round up the graphics, write a little blurb, and even get my name on that sidebar. We went through all that effort only to have Nat. Geographic come back and say, "We don't have room for that sidebar story. Sorry." Bummer.

Well, we were approached by Popular Mechanics recently, but the topic of their article will be "Mega-Fires." They want graphics and charts showing trends in fire activity in the U.S., whether # of fires and/or severity of those wildfires. They also wanted examples of situations where prescribed fires impacted the spread and severity of wildfires that subsequently burned over the same area. I threw together some examples of the Rodeo-Chediski fire from 2002 (what you see above). It burned nearly 500,000 acres -- that's what I'd legitimately call a "mega-fire." We'll see if this graphic assignment actually goes anywhere this time.

Speaking at a Mile High

2009-05-21T21:55:00.002-06:00

I returned from Denver, CO, yesterday after participating in a BAER meeting. Each year, a few of the Forest Service "regions" get together and do a refresher for BAER team members and leaders. They talk policy, protocol for assembling a team, pay, safety, tools available to teams while they do their assessment, responsibilities, etc.

Over the last 4 years now, I've been invited as a speaker and have given a talk on what I can do for them in the remote sensing and GIS arena. These meetings have taken me to LaGrande (Oregon), Spokane, Missoula, Chattanooga, and now Denver. I really enjoy these meetings because I get to interact with the BAER team folks face-to-face, get feedback, and help them better understand the products I deliver.

I got an hour to make my presentation and this time I took help. I've got a co-worker who is helping me out more and more and she came along on the trip. I let her give about a fourth of the presentation so she could get in front of the group and the could get to know her.

While this was a quick trip, I still had time to make a quick drive to Fort Collins to visit an old college buddy who's now a dentist up there. It was great seeing him and his family.

We're still trying to plan our Australia trip. It pretty much has to happen now as my boss thinks the international support is very important. I am getting contact info for people in Australia and I'm excited for the possibilities.

Jesusita Fire Severity

2009-05-15T07:26:00.003-06:00

Last Friday I was invited to participate in a conference call with CALFIRE, the disaster coordinator at USGS, and a lot of vendors / gov't entities. The topic was the Jesusita Fire in Santa Barbara, CA. We discussed the needs of the CALFIRE folks, the availability of various satellite imagery -- including Landsat, ASTER, SPOT, and the hi-res fellas (through NGA) Quickbird, IKONOS, and WorldView.

Last year I mapped every fire in the state of California that burned more than 1,000 acres, and since this fire was on both USFS and California lands, I was being asked to provide a map of the severity once it was out.

We were lucky to have a good Landsat collection last Saturday and I created my BARC layer. When I create these layers, I often drape them over the imagery and terrain in Google Earth and provide that KMZ to the BAER team or whomever requests the data. This screen shot is the Jesusita BARC in Google Earth.

BAER Down Under

2009-05-13T21:42:00.003-06:00

When the Australia wildfires were burning in February, the US Gov't sent over some BAER teams to assist in their emergency assessment. The BAER teams almost rely on our remote sensing support now, so they called us. Turns out my DOI counterpart did all the mapping for this round since I did the Greek fires during 2007.

Well, the Aussies saw the work the BAER teams were doing and were really interested in the remote sensing data. They indicated there were a bit interested in learning how they could receive this kind of support for future fire years. That sounded fun, but nothing much came out of it at the moment due to all that was going on.

I was talking to my DOI counterpart about this last week and told him we really need to pursue this. After that conversation, I spoke with my boss about the idea and he was totally for it. He said, "Well, this kind of thing (international support) looks good for RSAC, and we've got ample funding for you to go, so I think it's a great idea."

He left my cubicle and I immediately re-engaged the conversation with my DOI counterpart and said, "Okay, we're going in September. Get an official request from someone in the Australian gov't justifying our trip."

Now, before you say, "Great, another government boondoggle," let me say that this really would be a very useful trip for the Aussies. We could go over there and give them training in two basic phases:

How to track the fires and satellite imagery overpasses, ordering imagery, processing the imagery to top-of-atmosphere reflectance, and creating the dNBR and subsequently the BARC layer;
Once they have a BARC layer, we would then teach them what to do with it -- how to manipulate it, make edits, customize it to their ground observations, etc.

Then, instead of us being asked to support them in future years, they could handle it themselves. It's the whole, "Give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man how to fish, he eats for a lifetime" principle.

We've got no official word as of today, but I'm more likely than not going to go to Australia this fall. We'll wait until September or so in an attempt for our fires here to calm down and before Australia's summer begins in earnest. Here's to crossing my fingers.

I'm off to Denver next week for a BAER meeting. I'm an invited speaker at their annual BAER refresher. Fun stuff. For real.

Chattanooga

2009-04-17T20:19:00.006-06:00

I returned from one of my Southern trips yesterday. I was invited by the USFS Region 8 (Southern Region) BAER coordinator to be a speaker at their BAER team leader refresher. BAER in Region 8 is a bit different that it is elsewhere in the country. One of the biggest problems western BAER teams face is severe fire on steep slopes, therefore increasing erosion potential and putting life and property at immense risk during the next storms.

Well, in the South, they don't have 1) many steep slopes or 2) large wildfires. They may have one of those ingredients, but rarely both. Therefore, their BAER work is slightly different and they don't have nearly the contingency other regions have.

Regardless, they still had 22 people show up for this meeting to get trained. My role is to simply introduce the service I can provide to them on fire assignments through GIS and remote sensing. I gave an hour and a half talk and had a great time. It was a very informal setting (my favorite) and they were excited about the data I provide. Many of these folks will end up being a member on a BAER team out West, so this training is appropriate.

When it was over, one of the ladies said she was going to try to round up some training dollars so I could visit the region again and actually put on a hands-on class (I do this annually already). Another guy from the Region 8 Resource Information Management (RIM) group in Atlanta asked if it would be possible for me to visit the regional office and give the talk again. I was a little intrigued by this, but he said my talk could really energize the geospatial group down there. Not sure what that means, but if they pay for my trip, I'm sure my boss would be amenable to the idea.

I have part of a morning to walk around downtown Chattanooga. I visited the AA Chattanooga Lookouts stadium (Dodger affiliate -- boo!). I also walked around the aquarium and Tennessee riverfront. The weather was so nice I almost felt bad for my wife back in SLC suffering through a spring winter storm.

This is AT&T field. Not to be confused with San Francisco's AT&T / Pac Bell / whatever field.

This is the Tennessee Aquarium. I didn't actually go inside. Didn't have time to make it worth my $22.

This was one of the river tourist boats.

Paul Bunyan was an amputee? And he lived in Tennessee? I had no idea.

Gifts

2009-04-07T21:32:00.005-06:00

Through the six fire seasons I've been supporting BAER (Burned Area Emergency Response) teams, I've interacted with a lot of people. I've dealt with a plethora of field personnel, academia, interagency professionals, and researchers. I've attempted to provide good service to them. Occasionally, some of these people send their thanks in ways besides words.

1. Someone at the U. of Montana in Missoula was seeking a bunch of data from me. These data weren't easily extracted or delivered, so it took some effort on my part. This person recognized the work I was putting into their request. They asked how they could repay my efforts. "Oh, I like cookies..." I jokingly replied. A few days later, I got to work and found a basket full of cookies, delivered by a local florist / cookie joint. The person at the university seriously sent cookies. I really should request those more often.

2. I was trying to map a bunch of fires on the Clearwater NF during late summer 2003. We were having tons of problems with clouds and smoke in our imagery. After a few week effort of getting data, we finally got 'em all mapped. I got a package in the mail a few weeks later with, ironically enough, a waterproof match holder / lighter. It was marked with the following words: "Clearwater National Forest: Born of Fire." Along with this gift came a letter of appreciation.

3. Northern California lit up like a ... well ... wildfire last June. I mapped about 40 (large) fires in California last year alone. The Plumas NF in particular was hit with some ornery fires that were driving the FS folks crazy. I mapped each of their fires more than once in an effort to provide intermediate data so they could at least start on their field assessment while part of the fire was still burning. A few weeks later I got a package with a 12" long sugar pine cone. This wasn't your typical cone you'd see on any trees out here. It's enormous and was still dripping with sap. Yummy.

4. I traveled to Duluth, MN, this winter to give a report on my work on fires in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW). I gave a 30 minute talk to about 115 people, most of which were mostly Superior NF employees. About a month later, I got a package in the mail with a letter of appreciation and a coffee-table book called Chased by the Light by Jim Brandenburg. Sweet mother.

5. Finally (and this is probably my favorite ... you'll see why), Australia had a pretty significant fire season this year. Many people died and nearly 800,000 acres burned in a crazy month down under. The US Government sent over 3 BAER teams (of 30 people each) to help in their emergency assessments. This was essentially a "who's who" of BAER personnel -- or really an All-Star team. I'd worked with most of them over the last 5 years, so they called me for remote sensing support. It was decided that the USGS would support this effort (I'm assuming since I mapped the Greek fires in 2007), so I referred these folks to my Dept. of Interior counterpart. A month later, I got a visit from one of the returning BAER team members who is based out of Utah and he delivered two golf shirts that said "BAER Down Under 2009." I told the guy, "But I didn't actually do anything for these fires. I was just a casual observer." He said, "We don't care." The second golf shirt was for the guy who actually did the work and I had to mail it to him.

This was probably favorite, not because of the gift itself, but because I didn't have to do anything to get it!

Gifts aren't expected and are really just a nice token of appreciation from the field folks. I'm totally diggin' it.

Southern Man

2009-03-31T07:54:00.002-06:00

(That's Neil Young)

I first went to the "South" a few years ago for a wedding. I put quotes around South because everything I learned in geography classes and now experienced indicate Florida isn't really the South. I flew to Tampa and then went to my brother's wedding in Orlando. It was a good trip to the flattest state in the country and good to see something I hadn't seen before.

In January, I went back to the "South" for a multi-day meeting in Orlando. That was a good trip because I took the opportunity to do some exploring by visiting Cape Canaveral and Cocoa Beach.

Now, I've got two more trips to the real south planned. I'm flying to Chattanooga, TN, on April 14. I've been invited to speak at a BAER meeting for the Southern Region. This will be my first trip to Tennessee and my first trip to the real South. Luckily, my former boss is a Tennessean and he's already sent a list of places I need to see and where I should eat when I'm there.

Then in December, I'm going to Savannah, GA, for an AFE (Association of Fire Ecology) conference. We're hosting a MTBS workshop and I'll be helping in some sort of capacity.

The best part about all my Southern travels: none of the visits have been or will be in the summer! I get to experience them all without all the sticky humidity.

Fire #1 = Mapped

2009-03-18T21:45:00.002-06:00

I mapped my first wildfire of the season last week! I haven't mapped a fire for BAER support since November, so it was a nice break from what I've been doing. The fire I mapped was called the Hog Fire and it burned about 17,000 acres on the Coronado NF. This fire burned in the area where Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico all meet. It's way down there.

This fire gave me a good chance to run through my automation and model updates I've made this offseason. The biggest change from last year is that the Landsat data is now being delivered differently from USGS-EROS. They used to provide all their Landsat data in NLAPS format, projected in USGS Albers. They've shifted over to LPGS format, projected in UTM WGS84. I'm making processing changes as well as naming convention changes, which has a cascading effect down the line.

Everything went well and I can now say I've officially started my fire season.

I have three trips planned so far this year: Atlanta in April, Denver in May, and Savannah, Georgia in December. Atlanta and Denver are just over-nighter's where I'm speaking at BAER meetings. Savannah is a International Association of Wildland Fire conference and I'm participating in an MTBS workshop. I've never been to Atlanta or Savannah, so I've got some fun things to look forward to.

How to spend 1.15 billion dollars in 2 weeks

2009-03-04T21:16:00.004-07:00

The recent stimulus package passed a week ago or so is having an immediate impact on my job -- starting today. The USDA and separately the USFS were recipients of $$ to spend and they have little time to decide where and how to spend it. In particular, the Forest Service got $1.15B to spend and the Chief told her "people" that they had until this Friday to let her know how it was going to be distributed.

My office got pulled in because of our ability to display large amounts of data spatially for these suits to better make decisions. We made a Google Map interface that will tie directly into USA Spending to show stimulus project status (planned, in progress, or complete). We also made a ArcGIS web service that was low on pretty and high on usefulness. Our center manager got to demo these tools to the USDA Secretary Tom Vilsak and the demo actually made it to the White House a week ago.

Now that the demos are over, under-secretaries and deputies and department chiefs are using these tools to make decisions, so our office was basically running the tool and sharing it over a WebEx meeting. The suits would ask "Display all proposed facility projects in counties across the country that are rated in the bottom half of economic health." We'd oblige. Then they started asking things like, "How many jobs would we create and how much money would we spend if we approved X number of projects in Y types of counties?" The guy running the program couldn't keep up with the questions, so I was enlisted by our center manager to step in as a GIS technical specialist.

I basically sat on a laptop and ran various queries and summarized the data. They'd ask the question and I'd get to answer, "At that threshold, we'd create 3,128 jobs and spend $271,000,000." And then I'd repeat that for different thresholds they'd want to see. At 5pm Washington, DC, time, they not so subtely wrapped up the meeting and said, "We want three deliverables by tomorrow at 8am DC time:..." and then listed off three products -- both tabular and map. So, as they went home, we started working. I was at work until 6:45pm until I had to leave to attend to some church duties, but there were still 4 people working when I left. Two of those people were center managers in our building (there are 2 centers -- one remote sensing and one GIS) attempting to do GIS, an exercise they haven't done for many years.

I'm back to work tomorrow morning by 6am to sit on a WebEx session and conference call as I continue to provide GIS tech support. Although I have political differences with the stimulus package, it was a nice break in day-to-day duties to support the decision making of how to spend a cool 1.15 BILLION DOLLARS.

Wow, an update

2009-02-18T07:01:00.004-07:00

Ah, it's been over two months since my last post. Work and life have been busy!

Two things:
1. I will not be mapping the Australia wildfires. The Forest Service did get contacted about sending BAER teams to Australia to make an assessment, but the US Dept. of Interior it taking the lead on the mapping side of things this time. I have no problem with that as I took the lead on mapping the Greek wildfires during 2007. It's good to spread the wealth!

2. I'm currently on travel (that's when I seem to blog here...) in Cloquet, Minnesota. The Superior National Forest is hosting a symposium called "The Future of Fire and Wind in Northern Minnesota Forests." Due to my mapping efforts and visit to the Boundary Waters, the Superior NF invited us to speak at the symposium. Because it's February, and because the meeting is in Northern Minnesota, my boss elected to send me to give the talk. I actually really enjoyed preparing for this talk because the mapping and analysis was very interesting. I was comparing burn severities between prescribed fires and wildfires up in the Boundary Waters. Then I analyzed the impact the prescribed fires had on the severity and extent of the wildfires. It was good to see that interaction. FYI, the prescribed fires did indeed limit the spread and severity of a few of the wildfires in the area.

I arrived here yesterday and am flying home tomorrow. Quick trip...the best kind!

2008 Fire Season = Done

2008-12-04T22:49:00.002-07:00

Wow. I think fire season is officially over! I did my last severity maps today for fires that burned in Southern California last week. Some image examples here are from the Quickbird sensor showing some burned homes from the Sayre Fire (LA) and the distinct boundary between burned forest and unburned forest. The fireline -- while not completely successful -- is also visible.

Stats from this year:

Fires supported: 98
Acres mapped: 1,755,322
Satellite images processed: 108
Success rate: ~95% (about 95% of the emergency rehab teams that called got supported by me in time for their assessment)

It really wasn't too bad a year; basically, June - August was pretty bad in Northern California. I think the Fire Gods knew California would be a challenge so they held off on the rest of the country. Much appreciated...

So, what do I do during the winter time? I'm still neck-deep in MTBS and we've got another round of historical fire maps to get out. There are so much data associated with this project that it can be overwhelming at times. Lots of people and lots to do. We basically keep 5 people full-time on that project year round, with more coming and going as needed and as schedules allow.

More Field Visits

2008-10-31T09:05:00.004-06:00

I had the opportunity this week to visit two fires that burned last year within a few hours of SLC. We spent all day Monday on the Salt Creek Fire that burned on the south entrance of the Nebo Loop. We recruited the fire ecologist from the Uinta Wasatch Cache NF to be our hostess. She spent the day with us showing us various parts of this fire and some of the invasive species they're tracking. This fire burned mostly grass, sagebrush, oak, and juniper. Sagebrush doesn't regenerate easily; nor does juniper. But the grass and oak naturally resprout and are doing fine.

Observing the maps and the landscape.

The oak brush burned down to the nubbins, but it is a basal resprouter, meaning it comes back from the roots with no problem. Hard to kill this stuff.

More regenerating oak.

After spending a night in Nephi, we drove to Fillmore to meet a few BLM folks there who are responsible for the monitoring on the Milford Flats fire. This fella was the biggest fire in Utah's recorded history (~360,000 acres). We spent the entire day driving through and walking around this fire. It was crazy to see the scale of this thing. The only difficult thing was trying to picture the fire itself. Since we were there a year after it burned, and since it's so dang windy down there, there is little evidence of a burn scar. There wasn't much biomass to begin with and now there's slightly less. The BLM is taking drastic steps to "build" an ecosystem that is productive for them and the ranchers who lease out their lands for grazing. The BLM is planting thousands of acres of grass out there in the hopes that the rain and winds will cooperate and allow seedlings.

This area burned completely and with the high winds they get, filled in with sand. They are trying to plant grasses here and this area has been recently worked over but machinery like you see below.

Here's an example of what worked. The BLM considered this area a success. These grass clumps were planted last summer and are coming up well with plenty of seed stock. They're hoping the winter weather here will really help this area explode. Very little cheat grass existed here.

Using High Resolution Imagery for Fire

2008-10-10T14:26:00.003-06:00

We imaged the Gnarl Ridge Fire (NE slope of Mt. Hood in Oregon) last week with the high-resolution Quickbird sensor. I get so used to using Landsat and its 30m pixels that when I get something high res, I have to remind myself just how much more information we get...

But I'm not convinced high res is always better. There's so much information in this 3m imagery that it actually can become harder to use when I'm trying to find the mosaic of burn severity for the fire. Oh well. If the classified products don't work well, they can always just look at the imagery and see individual trees, dead or alive.

Local Fire

2008-10-03T21:48:00.004-06:00

We're currently getting our season-ending event this weekend, I hope. The entire West is wet and cloudy this weekend and should but a damper on most fire activity.

We had a 800-acre fire here on the Wasatch Front last month and I had a chance to map it. When I sent the BARC layer to my contact on the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache NF, he reviewed it and provided some feedback that reversed what I had mapped. In particular, he said he would have basically reversed my severity layer. In other words, the "high severity" areas in my map weren't what he considered a risk, and large chunks of "low severity" in my map were actually of interest to him and posed an erosion risk. The satellite image I used is linked here.

I decided to take the opportunity to make a field visit this week since the burn scar is about 15 miles from my house. The fire area is basically in the SE corner of the Salt Lake Valley on very steep terrain. We met one of the BAER implementation leaders and he showed us around. The team is doing some treatments to hopefully stabilize some of the hillslope, an important step considering the values at risk immediately below the burn scar.

Me and Jenn Lecker (co-worker) on the burn scar.

In this picture, you can see the Draper LDS Temple surround by these large homes. Most the houses in the area are very large and some are directly in the "line of sight" of potential mudslides or debris flows. The burn scar is visible in this picture, too.

30 or so pictures I took are linked on my online web album.

Are we done?

2008-09-12T21:40:00.005-06:00

In reality, it's been a quiet fire year. We've mapped over 80 fires, but only for 1.5 million acres (last year: 106 fires, 3.5 million). Even then, we've come a long way when we only mapped 25 fires for 400,000 acres in 2004. Things have changed dramatically in the last few years.

The end of June until about middle of August was very busy and when the meat of the work was done. It feels like we're in mop-up stage. Some of the western mountains have already had snow, the temperatures are dropping quickly, and some of the leaves are even changing color now. Where did my summer go?

Hopefully, we don't get any fire ignitions during the Santa Ana's in SoCal in October. They need a break.

I'll be attending the Int'l Association of Wildland Fire conference "The '88 Fires: Yellowstone and Beyond" in Jackson, WY, in a little over a week. I'm not presenting anything; rather, I'm simply going to observe and learn. I get precious few of these kinds of conferences. I also get to take my wife and kids since I'm driving as it presents no extra cost to take them with me.

Slow Down...

2008-09-03T15:39:00.002-06:00

This sign (with a bit of self-imposed censorship) typifies rural Wyoming / Montana. We passed this on our way to the Trail Creek Fire, a 10,000+ acre rangeland fire. Needless to say, with 2-wheel-drive on our SUV and washboard gravel roads, we were plenty slow.

Bighorns

2008-08-28T06:52:00.003-06:00

I'm on a trip in Wyoming visiting a few fires that burned last year. The Bone Creek and Little Goose fires burned in July/August last summer and provided a good field recon opportunity. Plus, Sheridan, WY, is the home of my Dept. of Interior counterpart, so we're having a great time.

This is my first trip to the Bighorns (sorry for the stock photos; I don't have a card reader here and can't upload my photos yet). This place is great. In Utah, I'm used to gamble oak, PJ, and sagebrush in areas not taken over by trees. Here, on the north-eastern side of the range, they have grass (gasp!) and coniferous trees. No PJ. No oak. Sagebrush in areas possibly overgrazed by cattle. It's beautiful.

We had a great look at the range, the trees, and open grass meadows yesterday as we pretty much drove from Sheridan to Shell. Today we visit the Trail Creek fire, a range fire that will provide the most insight for us. We sometimes struggle with mapping the severity of rangeland fires and seeing the effects on the ground will help alot.

I've got a tee time with 4 of the guys on the trip tonight at The Powder Horn. Should be fun.

Why do we continue to suppress?

2008-08-14T21:29:00.003-06:00

Everyone these days says this:

However, because fire is a natural (and often beneficial) process, fire suppression can lead to more severe fires due to the buildup of vegetation, which creates more fuel. (From http://www.usgs.gov/hazards/wildfires/)

It is true that we've been putting out nearly every fire ignition between 1910 and 1988. If you remember, in 1988, there was some sort of change of policy where some fires naturally started were allowed to burn -- to a point. Think of Yellowstone. Those fires were naturally started and they watched them burn for quite some time. It wasn't until the fires began threatening structures within the park that they started to suppress the fire.

Everyone seems to agree that fire is a natural and very important part of the ecosystem. Yet we continue to SUPPRESS SUPPRESS SUPPRESS. There's an interesting blurb about this on Wildfire Today.

One of the problems is that the wildland urban interface is continually increasing, meaning it's more and more difficult to let fires burn. This is what the main problem is in Southern California. The vegetation was used to burning; people built houses in the middle of it and suppressed everything; now when an ignition comes and gets out of hand, it's a serious problem. It's a no-win situation.

Indiana Flooding

2008-08-05T21:14:00.002-06:00

This has been a year of floods. My brother and his family live in Iowa City, IA, and were hit by some pretty serious flooding -- although not as bad as Cedar Rapids, just up the river. Indiana also got hit by some wild flooding. While this post has nothing to do with fire, it does have something to do with satellite imagery.

The image pair below shows the before and after images of some flooding. Take a look and read the provided caption:
Acquisition Date: June 09, 2007 and June 12, 2008
Path: 22
Row: 32-34
Lat: 38.9
Long: -87.7

Thunderstorms on June 6 and 7, 2008, produced up to 10 inches of rain in
some areas of central and western Indiana. On June 9, President Bush
declared 29 Indiana counties a major disaster area. A record flood stage of
34 feet was expected at the city of Mt. Carmel, Illinois, located at the
confluence of the Wabash and White Rivers. On June 12 (right image), the
Wabash River, which separates Illinois to the east and Indiana to the west,
was beginning to reach its crest of 22 to 25 feet at the city of Vincennes,
Indiana. At several locations, the Wabash River swelled to over 4 miles
wide.

California Update

2008-07-31T16:52:00.003-06:00

The fire situation in California is calming down -- sorta. The ignitions are down, but those still burning are cranking. Most of the ones we're tracking and mapping are in Northern California and on the NW part of the state (Siskiyou, Six Rivers, Shasta-Trinity, Klamath NFs). They've got a ton of land still on fire kicking up tons of smoke. The problem with the smoke up there is that they get inversions -- the smoke just settles down in all the valleys and makes mapping even part of the fire nearly impossible.

We've been asked to not only map all the USFS fires (like we usually do), but all the state fires in California, too. We set up an informal agreement to support the needs of CALFIRE in addition to the Forest Service. It won't add too many fires to our to-do list, but it is additional work.

I've now mapped about 45 fires this year -- 25 in California alone. I still haven't completely mapped the two largest fires yet: Basin Complex and Indians, both just south of Monterrey, CA. We're awaiting cloud-free imagery now that the fires are out. That's about 200,000 acres of burned lands.

We had a fire up City Creek Canyon here in SLC this week. It burned about 120 acres and it really helps to put things in perspective when thinking of a 200,000 acre fire. Crazy!

The LA Times put together a series of articles on wildfires. I found it very interesting, especially the business of fire part. This page highlights some of the costs and uses the example of the Zaca Fire -- another fire I mapped last year.

Pictures

2008-07-16T22:37:00.003-06:00

I've mapped 38 fires so far this year. After a slow spring, things have picked up nicely. I haven't mapped that many acres, but I've done a lot of individual fires. Most the fires have been in California and AZ-NM. There are still plenty of fires burning in California, but we've been able to keep on top of them. The nice thing is that the fires are going out at different times, so we are able to map them within reasonable work hours.

I came a cross a page on the Boston Globe showing some fantastic photos of the fire action/activity in California. Check out all 17 photos here.

This is a photo showing a converted DC-10 that drops retardant on large fires. Most retardant planes are much smaller than this because these planes have to fly very slowly and very low. It must be quite the spectacle to see a passenger plane like this swoop low over your head and drop this payload.

Indians Fire

2008-06-30T08:01:00.002-06:00

The California fire situation has become pretty serious. It's not a human-threatening as the SoCal fires seem to be, but the sheer # of fires and the smoke they're putting out is pretty crazy.

One of the fires I'm mapping is just south of Monterrey called Indians. It's on the Los Padres NF and has already been burning for a few weeks. It's currently the biggest fire burning in California. I've mapped it twice - once at 25,000 acres, again at 50,000 acres, and it's now over 60,000 acres. It is 85% contained, though, so there's hope!

Due to the fire situation, many assets are becoming available to us free of charge. For example, SPOT acquired a 10m Color-Infrared image on Saturday that is available for no charge. That isn't typical: I usually pay upwards of $9,000 for one of these things. This example is showing the Indians Fire perimeter from June 18 draped over the SPOT image that was acquired on Saturday. The black is burn scar.

California Burning

2008-06-23T09:44:00.003-06:00

Uh, yeah, it started. California had a busy weekend due to large dry lightning storms. At least half these guys are on USFS lands, so I'll probably be mapping them.

And there are more that didn't fit on this jpeg! Busy Busy Busy.

It's starting

2008-06-20T22:57:00.003-06:00

It looks like things are beginning to heat up. It's been a nice slow spring and early summer (it is the first day of summer today). But I had three fires imaged today and will have to map this weekend:

Indians (Monterey, California)
Corn Creek (Escalante, UT)
Whiskey (Mendicino NF in Northern California)

I have already mapped Indians once but it's probably doubled since I mapped it last Saturday night. I'm not sure why the satellite orbits are such that I've had to work two weekends in a row...

I'm also using AWiFS for the first time this year. I think I'll try to use it a lot more because I've got to wean myself from my Landsat dependencies.

Local Fires - Historical

2008-06-03T21:48:00.003-06:00

It's been a long time since posting, but I've had a pretty ho-hum Spring at work. I've mapped about 5 fires for BAER support so far, but things aren't really cookin' yet. I've spent most my time on MTBS. As a center, we've mapped nearly 500 fires since March. I am mapping whatever I can when time allows and I chose to map the fires that burned on Landsat path/row 38/32, the path/row that covers where I live.

Today, I finally started coming across fires that burned when I lived there (I arrived in Utah Fall '94). My dad's first job when we arrived in Utah was at now closed Ensign Bickford (also known as Trojan Explosives). Previous to our arrival, there had been an explosion at the plant that started a wildfire on the mountain where the plant sits. I got to map that fire today (shown here in this GE graphic).

It's amazing that 10 years later, the mountain is recovering, but there are still obvious artifacts of the fire. There are snags all over that mountain side and whatever trees that are coming back are still in the sapling/pole stage.

This fire is also a good lesson on geography. The thickest vegetation is always on the northern slopes, where there is an abundance of shade and moisture. That also happens to be where the highest burn severity - or lasting fire effects - were. More vegetation = more fuel = more intense fire = higher severity. The south-facing slopes were mostly oak and grass. Those areas tend to recover much faster.

I've made it to Google Earth

2008-04-23T21:25:00.004-06:00

I've been customizing Google Earth for a few years now. We've found a lot of value in draping our raster geospatial data over the terrain and imagery in Google Earth to share with various non-geospatial data users. It's useful and also still acts as eye candy for a lot of people.

However, today I noticed a first. Some of the imagery that exists in Google Earth is there because of me... (you'll see what I mean). Last summer, the Angora Fire burned immediately south of Lake Tahoe and was in the news quite a bit for a few weeks. A lot of homes burned down, but luckily no lives were lost. I mapped the burn severity of this fire for the US Forest Service BAER team and as part of that effort, I acquired a Quickbird image. Quickbird images provide a lot of great information due to their spatial resolution. After getting the image, I processed it and sent it on to my cooperators on the incident.

Google and DigitalGlobe (the folks who own the Quickbird sensor) have an agreement that allows Google to open DG's archive and pull whatever images they want so they can add them to Google Earth. It was fun to see an image I ordered and initiated in Google Earth for the entire world to see. Wohoo!

To see what I'm talking about: open Google Earth and do a search for "Fallen Leaf Lake". Pan immediately to the east and you'll see a distinct burned / unburned delineation. I've captured some screen shots to show what we can see from this image.

In image #1, you can easily see the burned area (lightest in color) and the red fire retardant drops.

This was intriguing to me because you could easily see which homes burned down and which ones were spared.

More Learning Opportunities

2008-04-17T21:06:00.002-06:00

My office is currently hosting a remote sensing conference. We hold it every two years and I participated in my first one during 2004. They used to hold them in various places throughout the country but have decided that holding it is SLC makes the most sense. It's a good conference because it pulls together most the people who do remote sensing in the Forest Service and other federal land management agencies. There's always a good fire track, so there are opportunities to learn and present new information.

A few things I appreciated and learned from this year's conference:

40% of the entire Forest Service budget goes to wildland fire suppression. Therefore, the use of GIS and remote sensing continue to play a visible and important role in everything fire-related (active fire mapping, post-fire effects, etc.).
DigitalGlobe is changing their business plan to do more speculative collections instead of relying so much on "customer calls in and orders a single image over location X,Y." This could be good for many applications, but won't work for fire. However, with the recent launch of WorldView1, the availability of Quickbird increased (I guess NGA just uses WorldView1...).
The Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC) can be a great sensor to use in many forestry applications. The key thing about DMC is the "C" in their name: constellation. They have 4 of the exact same sensors that fly in the same orbit and allow for global coverage every 4 days at 32 meter spatial resolution. I asked them for imagery of a fire in Alaska a few years ago but they missed the spot and got me an image of Anchorage instead. But their representative makes a good argument for the sensor's use...

During the middle of this conference, I made a quick trip up to Spokane for a BAER meeting. I've been asked to be a "trainer" at an annual BAER team leader refresher. This training is always between Regions 1, 4, and 6 (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Utah) and in various locales throughout the NW. It was in La Grande, OR, Missoula, MT, and now Spokane, WA this week. It was a quick trip but I am realizing that I really enjoy supporting the BAER community and their unique needs.

Changes in Personnel

2008-04-10T22:12:00.004-06:00

We're going through some considerable change at RSAC in the next few months/year. Our center manager announced this week that he's leaving to take a new position where he'll answer directly to the deputy of the USFS. Lucky for him, he'll be able to remain in Salt Lake even though it's a Washington D.C. job. He said to expect a new center manager by the end of the year (good ol' Federal Government -- can't do anything (!) fast). To fill the void, we'll have 120-day details for the position.

We also have 5 program areas at RSAC. Within a year or so, three of the program leaders will have retired. None of these program leader positions will be filled until after the center manager is replaced. One of the current program leaders is actually doing a Washington detail through July.

Lots of holes. Lots of changes. Not sure how it'll impact me and my future; only time will tell. There are only 10 federal FTE (full time employee) positions at my office -- the other 40 of us are contractors -- so these positions are coveted.

Short Bio For Me

2008-03-27T18:41:00.003-06:00

I've been in Washington, D.C., since Monday. I finally gave my presentation today at the JACIE 2008 conference. After listening to all the talks on Tuesday, I was struck by one thing: people's bio's. The emcee would introduce the next speaker and then read a novel about the person as the bio. Two in particular stuck out to me: Dr. Gene Whitney (from the White House Office and Science and Technology), and Kass Green (newly elected president of ASPRS). There's weren't really anything more than anyone else's, but they stuck with me due to the length and detail provided.

The funny thing was that after they were introduced, they'd stand before the audience and act a little bashful, like they were embarrassed so much was read about them (while we all know they provided the bio...).

I decided to have a little fun. Here's the bio I submitted to the conference committee and it was read before my talk today:

Jess Clark is a remote sensing analyst for RedCastle Resources, under contract at the US Forest Service Remote Sensing Applications Center (RSAC), in Salt Lake City, Utah. He has a B.S. in GIS and an M.S. in Geography, both from Brigham Young University. Jess manages the post-fire severity mapping program at RSAC for all wildfires on US Forest Service lands.

Since his professional bio will never compare to Gene Whitney or Kass Green, here are a few personal tidbits: Jess roots for the San Francisco Giants, Indianapolis Colts, Utah Jazz, and Nebraska Cornhuskers (all representing states he's lived in). He loves to golf, play basketball, and city-league softball. He's not a big fan of candle-lit dinners or long walks on the beach, but he still managed to get married and now has three beautiful daughters. Oh, and he's finally turning 30 this year!

Needless to say, it was unlike any bio read during this conference.

2008-03-15T17:05:00.002-06:00

Still no fires that I need to care about... Lots of fires in Oklahoma and Texas, but they are mostly grassland or ag fires that we don't need to worry about.

I completed my PPT for the JACIE conference. This talk will be a much different than others I've given. The subject matter hasn't changed, but this audience will have no fire people at all. It's a conference about characterization and calibration of commercial remote sensing platforms. My talk will be focused on application of said remote sensing platforms. I included lots of pretty graphics in an attempt to capture their attention and not bore them with the details that they won't care about.

Hopefully, the cherry blossoms will be somewhat in bloom when I get out there March 24th. I don't have a lot of free time each day, but I may be able to see some of the sights I missed last time.

On the road again

2008-03-03T21:17:00.003-07:00

I figured it out today: I've been gone on business travel for 42 nights and about 75 days since I started working at RSAC. I'm now preparing to go on another one. I submitted an abstract to the Civil Commercial Imagery Evaluation Workshop a month ago and it was accepted. I'll be speaking about ... you guessed it ... mapping burn severity using commercial satellite imagery. Take a look at the agenda. I'm speaking on Thursday.

If there were any airfare deals right now, I'd take my wife with me. But alas, there is nothing less than $540 during the week I'm there. I'll be a lonely man in the wilderness.

Wet winter = no fires?

2008-02-26T21:18:00.005-07:00

Every year, people try to predict the upcoming fire season. It's almost humorous to follow. Here's what you'll generally hear:

We've had such a dry winter that all the fuels will be bone dry. It's a tinder box out there! Expect resources to be stretched thin with all the fires we're going to have.

Or...

We've had such a wet winter that it will promote lots of fine fuel growth (i.e. cheatgrass). All this extra fuel will lead to rapidly spreading fires that get into heavier fuel. Expect resources to be stretched thin with all the fires we're going to have.

Hmmm...

Fires need three things: fuel, oxygen, and ignition. In both winter scenarios, fuel and oxygen are provided. Ignition remains the variable. It all depends on dry lightning storms and idiots starting fires in places or circumstances they shouldn't.

In Salt Lake City, we've basically had continuous snow cover at my house on the west bench since Nov. 29. It's continued until hopefully this weekend when most, if not all, the snow will be melted from my yard. Of course, another storm is predicted for Sunday, but here's to holding out hope.

I thought these maps were telling. They show snow cover (white) over the United States for November, December, and January. Watch the days click off on the bottom right of the map to give you the time context. Enjoy.

Nov: http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2007/nov/snow.html
Dec: http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2007/dec/snow.html
Jan: http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2008/jan/snow.html

Back to Writing

2008-02-22T09:39:00.002-07:00

One of the objectives of our recent trip to Denver was to get support from the national and regional BAER coordinators for a report we want to write. Here's the problem:

BAER teams are assigned to fires all over the country. Most fires of any significant size get remote sensing support from me in the form of satellite imagery and some sort of GIS layer showing a preliminary cut at burn severity (over 100 in each of the last two years). Some fires don't get anything from me, though, due to satellite orbits or inclement weather such that I can't image the fire.

However, with more and more turn over in the USFS workforce (due to "transformation" and retirement), how people use the data I send and how to validate it and how to hand-map a fire if they don't get anything from me isn't really clear. What models do people use? What field forms do they use? Should they test for water repellancy? What ancillary factors should they consider when hand mapping a fire (things like potential needlecast that provide instant ground cover, therefore reducing runoff and erosion)?

Anyway, we're teaming up with the San Dimas Technology and Development Center and the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Moscow, ID, to write a General Technical Report (GTR - see examples here) to address these topics. It will act as a guide that BAER teams can reference when they are assigned to a fire. It will hopefully help with consistency and with new talent as they come into the Forest Service.

Quick Trip

2008-02-11T20:42:00.000-07:00

I've traveled overnight probably 20 times since I've taken the current job I'm in. But until tomorrow, I've never flown somewhere, attended a meeting/presentation, and then flown home the same day.

I'm taking an early flight to Denver tomorrow to brief the regional BAER coordinators on the 2007 fire season and how I supported them with remote sensing technologies. There are 8 regional coordinators in the country and a national coordinator. This is the fifth year I've presented to these coordinators. (Honestly, after five years, it's kinda tough finding new things to tell these coordinators! It's a struggle to find new information besides the basic stats of the fire season.)

I present right after lunch for about an hour and then fly home tomorrow night around 7pm. I'm not looking forward to leaving my home around 5:30am tomorrow morning, but I'm also very glad to not be going overnight. So is my wife.

Forest Fire Jihad

2008-02-03T20:20:00.000-07:00

I got this in an email a week ago. It's interesting since we heard that many of the Greek fires I mapped this summer were in fact started due to domestic terrorism. Read on (I apologize for the layout of the text -- I copied it from an email and I didn't want to fuss with it):

U.S. intel alerted to threat of 'Forest Fire Jihad'
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Geostrategy-Direct.com

U.S. officials monitoring terrorist web sites have discovered a call for using forest fires as weapons against "crusader" nations, in what may explain some recent wildfires in places like southern California and Greece.

A terrorist website was discovered recently that carried a posting that called for "Forest Jihad." The posting was listed on the Internet on Nov. 26 and reported in U.S. intelligence channels last week.

The statement, in Arabic, said that "summer has begun so do not forget the Forest Jihad."

The writer called on all Muslims in the United States, Europe, Russia and Australia to "start forest fires."

The posting quoted imprisoned Al Qaida terrorist Abu Musab Al-Suri, as saying "Jihad is an art just like poetry, music, and the fine arts.
There are people that draw and there are others that are jihadists. They both act upon inspiration."

Al-Suri is a senior Al Qaida leader captured in Pakistan in 2005 who is believed to be in U.S. custody.

"The idea of forest fires is attributed to him, may God set him free, as is in this short clip," the writer stated.

The posting said that setting forest fires were legal under extremist Islamic law as part of a "eye for an eye" and that can produce "amazing results."

Wildfires in California burned more than 500,000 acres beginning in October and authorities said arson was to blame for some of the fires.
In August, wildfires broke out in Greece that authorities say were deliberately set.

The writer stated that it was permissible to burn trees in carrying out jihad.

"Scholars have justified chopping down and burning the infidels' forests when they do the same to our lands," the writer said.

The writer stated that "targeted forests" are in the nations that "are at war with Muslims," including the United States, Europe, Russia, and Australia.

Other nations, including Brazil are "off limits" because Brazil has not joined the "armies of the crusade."

On damage caused by wildfires, the report said that the fires typically take months to put out which means that "this terror will haunt them for an extended period of time."

The fires also will cause economic damage because it will limit exports of timber used to make furniture and also will cause losses to pharmaceutical companies that use trees for ingredients for drugs, the posting said.

Smoke caused by the fires will create pollution and military forces could be tied up fighting fires. The report noted that U.S. military forces in Iraq or Afghanistan "could even be recalled" as occurred following hurricane Katrina, which did not occur.

"Imagine if, after all the losses caused by such an event, a jihadist organization were to claim responsibility for (starting) the forest fires," the writer said. "You can hardly begin to imagine the level of the fear that would take hold of people in the United States, in Europe, in Russia, and in Australia."

The report said that Abu Musab Al-Suri, urges terrorists to use sulphuric acid to start a forest fire, as well as gasoline.

The article was signed by Abu Thar Al-Kuwaiti, on behalf of a group called the Al-Ikhlas Islamic Network.

Fire Conference

2008-01-29T20:23:00.000-07:00

It's a lot easier to post when I'm on travel. I can't really do it at work (because I'm too busy and I shouldn't), and when I get home, I tend to focus my energies on my immediate family blog (here) or my extended family blog (here). So this one gets pushed aside.

But I'm on travel and don't have anything else to do, so I blog! This is the third business trip in a row that I haven't even turned on the television, so I tend to always have a few hours in the evening to surf the net and blog.

I'm at the Association for Fire Ecology conference in Tucson, AZ. It was very (!) nice landing in Tucson, looking out the window, and seeing some dude on the tarmac in a short-sleeved shirt. Much nicer than the long winter I've already endured back home.

This conference is focusing on fire in the Southwest. I've mapped 58 fires in the last 6 years in AZ and NM for BAER support, so I'm fairly familiar with the recent fire history. I did a poster presentation tonight for my boss (highlighting MTBS) and am giving an oral presentation tomorrow morning re: remote sensing for BAER support. It's nice that there is a whole track at this conference just devoted to BAER. I've been able to sit in on some very interesting talks.

One example is a talk given by Sue Cannon, the lead scientist on the USGS Landslide Hazard project. She's led a charge to take burn severity data, apply it to watersheds, take a plethora of weather information (rainfall intensity and duration, for example), and model areas most susceptible to debris flows. The NWS takes her data and adds it to their flash flood warning system and now, in their alerts on TV, add information like "Due to recent fire activity and heavy rainfall in Rendija Canyon, there is a severe risk of debris slides" to their scrolling marquee. Previously, they'd list only flash flood potentials, and it'd never be specific to fires.

I was very interested in this because, while these examples are focuses mainly in Southern California (see examples here), we had a very similar request from the NWS in Utah. They wanted our burn data so they could add the same kinds of information to their flash flood warnings. I was also intrigued by her talk because I have been the source of many of the burn severity data she's used in her analyses.

Visitors to the office

2008-01-22T20:26:00.000-07:00

We had a couple of visitors to our office today. The federal-civilian rep and his main customer service representative for SPOT Image, Corp. (in Chantilly, VA, not Toulouse, France, where the headquarters are) were making a trip to Denver and decided to add a leg to SLC just to visit our office.

We used to use SPOT a lot more than we do now. Of the 140 satellite images I purchased last year for fire support, none were SPOT images. Most were Landsat (5 or 7), ASTER, and AWiFS. The biggest constraint to SPOT imagery is the cost - we paid $10,000 for a SPOT 5 scene with all the priority programming and rush delivery. With the Landsat Data Continuity Mission in question due to sensor failures, SPOT is making a push to be a filler sensor. Both they and AWiFS make compelling arguments. I'm curious to hear who wins out. If SPOT wins, they'll set up a receiving station at EROS in Sioux Falls, SD, and allow EROS to distribute the imagery. We'll see.

Anyway, the SPOT representatives made an interesting proposal to us. They mentioned that they are considering establishing a disaster service program for things like hurricane and wildfire support. This program would be subscription based and probably cheaper. That is quite appealing to us. The idea is that we pay a flat fee (like $50,000) and then have the right to purchase X number of images with over X number of years with all the emergency processing and delivery. I'd certainly be more apt to use SPOT imagery if this was the case.

The one problem that remains with SPOT imagery is the lack of a longer SWIR band like Landsat band 7. The dNBR algorithm we use for our fire mapping uses a near infrared band and a SWIR band (2.08 - 2.35 micrometers). SPOT has a shorter SWIR band (1.55-1.75~ micrometers) and the algorithm doesn't work as well.

5 Years Already

2008-01-19T10:49:00.000-07:00

Jan. 6 was my five year anniversary at RedCastle Resources. It's been a great job and I've been lucky to be in situations to learn so much and feel like I'm a contributor to the success of the company. Even after 5 years at RSAC, I'm still one of the youngest guys there. There are a few web guys and an intern who are younger, but of the remote sensing professionals, I'm still the youngest.

My first project at RSAC was a programming in ArcObjects / VB one that took me about 6 months. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but I knew more about ArcObjects than anyone else, so even at my fresh-out-of-college status, I got the job.

I started working on emergency fire support in August, 2003, and have really been managing the program by myself since then. This has been where my greatest growth has been. It's been a great remote sensing learning experience, good dealing with end-users in the field, putting on training, and being able to travel quite a bit to various places around the West.

My experience hasn't been perfect. Like most companies, we have plenty of baggage. There are some people who have no right still working there, mostly due to their complete lack of work ethic. I'd expect this from "tenured" federal employees whose only goal is retirement, but not necessarily in our contracting company. Every once in a while, some people should be asked/forced to move on.

Luckily, I enjoy my work enough now that working is rarely a chore, but actually enjoyable. It's good to work on projects that have immediate and actual use for end users.

Dang, it's cold

2008-01-14T21:14:00.000-07:00

I'm currently sitting in a hotel room in Sioux Falls, SD. As we were flying in (in our tin can with wings), the pilot came over the intercom and reporting the temperature in Sioux Falls at 10 degrees. This was a 5pm. I imagine when we wake up tomorrow, it'll be below zero. Crystal clear night, no insulation for the atmosphere = bitter cold!

I had a hectic morning trying to wrap up a few fires that slipped through the cracks, but got as much done as I could. We're pretty confident that we got done what we said we'd do.

In the Pacific Northwest, we mapped 1,927 fires that burned more than 1,000 acres. Our project collaborators (USGS-EROS) mapped all fires in California (aka the Pacific Southwest). We are moving on to the Southwest (Arizona-New Mexico) and the Southeast next. Both are large undertakings because there are actually a ton of prescribed burns in the Southeast and Florida always has very active wildfire seasons. Half the energy exerted in this project is filtering through all the duplicate fire IDs/points to assign one as a primary, map it, and then attribute all the duplicates as such. Quite a challenge keeping these data straight.

We will soon start selecting new pre- and post-fire images for the next round of fires to map. Turns out I no longer have an offseason. I used to follow the baseball season with my BAER support, but now with the infusion of MTBS, I go from my BAER support straight to MTBS support and back again. Fire, fire, and more fire.

I did have a fun experience today in the airport, though. I was sitting next to some lady in the terminal waiting for my flight and then her husband returned from the restroom with a young child. I'd never seen the woman, but I immediately recognized the guy. He was a classmate of mine in high school. Turns out he lives in Brookings, SD and is pursuing a PhD in demographics at South Dakota State University. I hadn't seen this guy in 10 years (yup, I'm getting old) and we ended up sharing the same flight to South Dakota today.

Querying Data

2008-01-09T20:56:00.001-07:00

You're going to laugh at me, but that's okay. I've used Microsoft Access a few times, even built a form to create a table of data, but never really done much with the functionality that exists in this program. I guess like a lot of people, I've always used Excel as my database and manipulated data that way.

Today, I actually used Access like I am supposed to. I imported a table of tons of data and ran queries to find specific data. For example, we've got a table that lists the 4500 fires we've mapped so far (or that we've supposedly mapped for MTBS), but there are a number of problems with these data. I ran queries to find all fire that have been mapped but haven't been through our reporting process (the part that summarizes the burn severity acres by ownership, slope, vegetation type, etc.). This is all possible in Excel, but so much easier in Access.

Glad I learned something I should have learned a long time ago. I wish I had taken a database management and design class in college, too. This is one area that I feel I lack.

I can see the light...

2007-12-28T21:09:00.000-07:00

Great news: PNW is pretty much done for MTBS. We've had a busy two weeks trying to get everything done by the new year, and I've mapped 88 fires in the last 7 working days. It's too bad we weren't more efficient in July...

I've got three trips coming up in the next two months:

Sioux Falls, SD: Great. Just who plans trips to South Dakota in January?! As a friend once said, "In Sioux Falls, there's nothing between you and the North Pole but a barbed wire fence!" We're going for an MTBS meeting regarding the completion of PNW and PSW historical mapping.
Tucson, AZ: Ahhh...much better. Arizona the same week the Super Bowl will be in Phoenix. I can handle this. Arizona in January I can do. I'm going to the Assoc. of Fire Ecology (AFE) conference to present about my support to wildland fire BAER teams. It's a short trip.
Fairbanks, Alaska: What? We're back to cold locales in the middle of winter? Who's doing this to me? It will be my first trip to Alaska, but I don't think I'll have much sunlight in February and it could be awfully chilly. Hopefully, the Aurora Borealis will be spectacular. I also have a college buddy who lives in Anchorage, so I may extend my trip a day or so to see him.

All the trips are fairly quick, which is good. I like to go on trips, but I love to be at home with my beautiful wife!

I just wanna sip hot cocoa...

2007-12-18T20:21:00.000-07:00

I have been so busy at work that I haven't even had time to blog about it. No, seriously. One of the biggest struggles this fall has been trying to manage my time off. I can keep 120 hours of comp/vacation time over the new year and I have 160. Sound easy, right? Just take a week off around Christmas.

Can't. Not only that, but I'm actually accruing more comp time because I'm working more than 8 hour days. Luckily, as a contractor, I can get my "use or lose" time paid out like a bonus. It's heavily taxed, but it comes as cash none the less. I am getting 40 hours of time paid out this Friday.

What's keeping me at work? MTBS! We had a big deadline that we already missed in November that was pushed back to the end of the year. The task was to map about 1900 fires between 1984-2004 in the Pacific Northwest (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Western Montana). Tons of fires! We were also supposed to map about 300 fires that burned in 2005.

We're still a few hundred fires short, but it is mostly due to slow data delivery from EROS. If we don't get satellite imagery from them, we can't map the fires.

I've personally mapped 27 fires in two days and my goal is 60 this week. Hopefully we can get more data in so those who are actually going to work most of the Holiday season have stuff to do! That's an additional challenge I face: I am managing the production and the 8 people assigned to map these fires. It's a constant struggle to keep them all busy.

In DC...kinda

2007-11-27T16:00:00.000-07:00

I can't believe it's been two weeks since I last wrote. I arrived in DC last night. Well, I actually got here early this morning (checked into my hotel at 12:30am)...and it's not really DC. I'm staying at the Greenbelt, MD, Marriott Hotel. I'm right across from NASA Goddard, south of NSA and the Ft. Meade NGA office, and still about 10 miles from downtown DC.

I spent all day today in a ResourceSat seminar. The morning was a little drab because all the talk was about crop monitoring and mapping. The afternoon was much better and they spoke about things applicable to my work. I was also able to put faces to names and meet some people who will be useful in my work for next summer's fire season.

I have tomorrow off, basically, and will spend it doing some sightseeing. I will head downtown (on the Metro) to see the sights, like the Smithsonian Air and Space museum. I will also hopefully hook up with a college classmate, who now works in Reston, for lunch.

Fun trip so far. I'm very (!) tired today, though.

I'm coming to DC

2007-11-14T20:42:00.000-07:00

I've had an interesting development this week. I signed up to attend a seminar in Greenbelt, MD (just north of DC) regarding the IRS Resourcesat P6 satellite platform. It's a one-day seminar that runs all day Tuesday, Nov. 27. I didn't want to spend all day Monday flying to DC and another full day flying back on Wednesday for a 1 day seminar.

I've never been to DC and I wanted to spend a little more time out there. But I wanted my work to pay for the extra time and nights (hotel $$). So I contacted a few folks I know out there to see if I could present a brown bag sort of presentation regarding satellite imagery support for wildfires in the Forest Service.

The response has been good: I was asked to present to all the remote sensing leads for the agency--not the USFS, but the USDA, which the USFS is a part of. That is Thursday morning. That meant I had all day Wednesday now free and clear.

Instead of simply wandering the streets and sights of DC on Wednesday, however, I emailed contacts at NGA and OFDA (Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance) and asked if I could get a tour or at least meet them in person. I worked with OFDA when I mapped all the Greek Fires. I'd make my map products and then forward them on to OFDA who would print them out and hand them off to the field teams before they left for Athens.

After contact was made with OFDA, I got word that they would also be interested in a brown bag presentation regarding my fire support. But then it got forwarded to a few people at the USFS International Programs group and now they want a sit-down meeting/presentation regarding remote sensing support for disasters -- specifically the Greek support I provided.

That meeting will be Wednesday. I'm excited to give these presentations and to make additional contacts, but I may have squandered away some of the precious free time I planned to have for sightseeing.

One nice thing is that on my flight from SLC to Baltimore, I have a 4 hour layover in Cincinnati, where my sister lives. Looks like I will get a brief tour of her new home.

We're done!

2007-11-09T10:32:00.001-07:00

Southern California came and went. We were very busy for a few weeks, but were able to map all the fires in question. My Dept. of Interior counterpart took care of the San Diego County fires and I took care of the rest. I ended up mapping 8 fires:

Malibu Canyon, Ranch, Magic, Buckweed, Grass Valley, Slide, Santiago, and Ammo.

I ended up using Landsat 7 SLC-Off, AWiFS, and the photography flown by the NASA UAS called Ikhana. The photography was 10m resolution and was collected with the spectral bands I needed to map the fire.

The international disaster charter was enacted, but didn't provide that much useful imagery that was at least timely. Things worked out much better this go around when compared to 2003. That was a real headache.

NASA is still acquiring imagery using the MASTER sensor. That imagery will have 50 spectral bands and will be collected at 5m spatial resolution. This imagery isn't needed for my postfire soil burn severity mapping efforts, but other agencies (CAL FIRE, FEMA, San Diego County) will find a lot of use in it.

Clear Imagery Acquired Today

2007-10-26T17:30:00.000-06:00

While the UAV NASA folks collected nice imagery over some of the fires, getting it in a useful format (spectral bands) has been very difficult. They were having computer problems today that prohibitied them from making the necessary changes for me, so who knows what's going to happen.

AWiFS did collect an image today, though. It was a great look at the whole region. I love that this sensor has such a large footprint and still provides decent spatial resolution (56m) for my purpose. I never need the 1m fancy imagery stuff everyone shows on the news. Here's the image from today with the fire perimeters draped over and some crude annotation I did.

I mapped the Slide and Grass Valley Fires from this image today. I will also do the Camp Pendleton and Santiago fires from this fella, but my DOI counterpart will handle the Poomacha, Witch, and Harris fires.

Moving Forward with the Mapping

2007-10-25T11:16:00.000-06:00

I've mentioned this before, but I'll say it again. I love MSNBC's picture slide shows. They always have a few gems in their collections. The slide show I saw today was regarding the fires in SoCal. I thought this was a great photo, so I'll share it again.

I am mapping my first fire today: Buckweed. The fire is listed as 100% contained and the clock is ticking. The BAER team is already assembling. I'll be mapping it from the photography collected from the Ikhana UAV (mentioned in the previous post).

My DOI counterpart and I have broken the workload such that he'll map the large San Diego fires (Harris, Poomacha, and Witch) and I'll handle the rest. Seems fair, as most the northern fires are mostly on USFS lands anyway, and the ones further south are more a potpourri of ownerships.

We also received word of our first image delivery as a result of the Disaster Charter. JAXA collected imagery of the San Diego fires with their AVNIR-2 sensor. I've never used this fella, so it'll be a new experience for me.

SoCal Update

2007-10-24T16:51:00.000-06:00

Our air quality here in SLC isn't very good this week. Everyone's first reaction is to blame the wildfires in SoCal. However, I've checked the MODIS imagery and noticed that all the smoke is still blowing offshore and not heading inland.

This is today's image collect (zoomed out pretty far). Still lots of smoke. I'm a little concerned that the fires are calming down and we didn't schedule any collects until Sunday.One nice option may be the photography collected by a NASA UAV that's been on a 10-hour mission over most the fires. Our office is involved in this effort and I hope to use some of their data. A few fires are mostly done burning: Ranch, Buckweed, and Grass Valley. The UAV (Ikhana) flew over all of them today. This graphic below is an example of the images draped in Google Earth.

Back to the grind!

2007-10-24T08:22:00.000-06:00

Well, we're officially back on. About 15 fires are burning and have burned around 400,000 acres, consumed many homes, and taken the lives of a few people. We are beginning to ramp up our efforts to secure imagery of these fires.

I got a call from the USGS yesterday asking if I would send them an email requesting assistance from The International Disaster Charter on behalf of the USFS. I decided to pass that on to my boss, but we did get that going. This basically means that all these vendors -- commercial or governmental -- will be providing imagery for free of all these fires. We get to decide which sensors to use and where to point them. This is much different than 2003, when we were limited to a few real options and a big pain in the butt.

When Southern California lights up, everyone wants to be involved. Sensors we couldn't task (like ALI aboard NASA's EO-1) during the rest of the fire season are suddenly interested in helping. Everybody wants to be in the news.

I also start getting calls from random people asking for information. Yesterday, I got a call from a guy representing Countrywide Financial Corp., a large mortgage company. They wanted info. on the fire activity to begin thinking about how to deal with all the claims that will be coming in soon.

Not so fast, buddy

2007-10-22T14:15:00.000-06:00

Oh great. Fire season is not over. Things are not looking good in Southern California. People are losing homes, a life has already been lost, and acres are burning like they were in 2003. Hopefully, things won't be as crazy.

Gotta get back in fire mapping mode...

Wrapping it all up

2007-10-11T14:16:00.000-06:00

Well, I'm going out on a limb and saying fire season is officially over. The only thing left that could possibly happen is Southern California lighting up. That happened this late in the year in 2003. But there has been no activity at all during the last few weeks.

I had two fires (complexes, really) that didn't get complete mapping. We went from fire, smoke, and clouds to snow. I have images of the fire in each of those states and never got a complete look, dang it. Those will have to wait until next summer for a re-mapping effort.

With my BAER support virtually done, I now have to wrap up all the loose ends, make end of year summaries, posters, reports, etc. And I also transition into MTBS production mode. I mapped few fires for MTBS during this last summer and now need to get as many done as possible. It's pretty mindless and can wear a person out!

Greece? Hah

2007-09-27T19:24:00.000-06:00

Ain't gonna happen. The GIS analyst guy from D.C. will be the lucky contestant. So I will sit here in my lonely cubicle in SLC, probably still working for them in Greece, but without any of the travel glory!

Greece? Really?

2007-09-26T11:59:00.001-06:00

I was talking to Annette Parsons about a week ago about the Greek Fires I've been mapping. She indicated that they'd be going back to do the field verification / final mapping effort for a few weeks in October. I -- nearly in jest -- mentioned that I'd love to go because she'd need some help with the processing and the image interpretation. She asked, "Are you available" and I said, "Of course. It's Greece."

These kinds of things just don't happen. For one thing, I'm a private contractor with the FS and these kinds of international disaster assistance programs are run and filled by federal employees. There are a lot of hoops to jump through if they want to send someone from outside the federal employment circle.

Annette called me yesterday and her first question was "Do you have a valid passport?" I thought, "Hmmm...I know where this is going..." I said I did and then she asked if I was available Oct. 5 - 20, 2007, for a possible GIS assignment in Greece with her. I said, "Of course, it's Greece." She was going to make a formal request with her D.C. contacts to have me come with her instead of the GIS person they assigned to her. I guess she'd spoken with him about his background / abilities and decided she'd be a lot more comfortable with me coming along to help.

She sent the email, but no word has come back either way. She did mention this morning on the phone that one of the guys in the group was pushing to get the originally-assigned GIS person to go to get the experience. However, Annette said she's pushing back because "getting experience" isn't the goal here; rather, she wants to hit the ground running and could do that with my help.

In the past few days, my odds of going to Greece have gone from 1 million to 1, to 1,000 to 1, to 50 to 1, and now back up to 75 to 1.

Needless to say, I'm not making any plans to go. If the chance arises, how cool. If not, I'll get to celebrate my 6th anniversary with my wife in person instead of via email.

Fire Drama

2007-09-23T21:54:00.000-06:00

I love MSNBC's "Week in Pictures." The first picture in this past week's collection was of particular interest to me due to the subject matter. This picture is of the Butler 2 Fire on the San Bernardino National Forest. This fire burned awfully close to Big Bear Lake (on a side note...I chuckle when I see the name of that lake. It really isn't the "big" Bear Lake us Utahns refer to. We have a truly "big" Bear Lake on the Utah-Idaho border...).

This picture reminded me of the drama evident on every fire that I often forget because I map these fella after they are out.

Fires in Greece

2007-09-19T21:11:00.000-06:00

During July and August, many fires ravaged through Greece. I'd see the news on TV and in the paper and was amazed at a few things: 1) the # of fires; 2) the size of the fires; and 3) why they were killing so many people. Wildfires don't typically kill over 60 people in the U.S., but we also don't have nearly the fragmented landscape they do.

For example, this year there are two fires (East Zone Complex and Cascade Complex) in Idaho that have combined to burn over 600,000 acres. Number of casualties? Zero.

In Greece, their fires burned no more land than that (but in over 200 fires), but killed about 65 people. It's really a sad tale.

Well, one of my coworkers went to Greece to help with on a BAER assignment. She's a soil scientist and knows her stuff well. I was on a BAER assignment for the Neola North Fire earlier this year with her. While she was in Greece, she met with the Greek government to discuss the BARC mapping process and volunteered to get that rolling. So I got a call.

After my Dept. of Interior counterpart ordered and delivered the imagery, I've spent the last three days creating both perimeters and severity maps of these fires. Today alone I mapped seven large complexes that covered over 450,000 acres on the Peloponnese peninsula. It's crazy. The imagery I have (gap-filled Landsat 7) isn't great, but it's sufficient for the job.

The assessment team is heading back to Greece in a few weeks to do some ground verification. Wish I could piggy-back on that assignment, but I'm destined to be an office monkey. Boots on the ground for something like this? No way. Those kinds of opportunities would go to my boss!

Week in Missoula

2007-09-13T21:14:00.000-06:00

The meeting went pretty well. If you ask me, there are still some things left undecided and confusing, but we need to press on. Hopefully, I can divorce myself from this project in terms of operations and just provide some assistance occasionally when needed. The biggest problem with this project seems to be that one half of the room was trying to use us for Washington-level reporting needs, while the other half was trying to use us for project-level decisions. Not a good place to be in. No man can serve two masters!

The rest of the week has been very nice. I spent all day yesterday in the mountains visiting an FIA (Forest Inventory and Analysis) plot to discuss a new accelerated re-evaluation project and also to walk through the CBI (Composite Burn Index) with these folks. I was the only one there who had done it before (we did it in the Boundary Waters a lot). Nice day, but very long.

Today I spent some time in the mountains again, but mostly for recreation. We drove east from Missoula to a ghost town called Garnet. That was a pretty cool spot! It's an old mining town that once had 1,000 people and now has about 22 structures remaining and evidence of their mining history. Cool place to visit.

I am excited to head back tomorrow. I've got all morning free and I'm not sure what I'm going to do! Perhaps golf?

RAVG Presentation

2007-09-11T07:30:00.000-06:00

I made it to Missoula yesterday. That's a flight I can handle. Only about an hour and a half, which makes flying in the tin cans with wings do-able. On the flight in, I could easily see the Sawmill Complex burning on the east side of the Bitterroot Valley. I could also see a ton (!) of smoke on the western side of the valley. Central Idaho has truly had a monumental fire season this year. I mean, we're talking 6 to 700,000 acres of land that has burned in a few hundred mile radius. Absolutely crazy.

I am attending the National Silviculture meeting this morning and will be a presenter. I will only be speaking for about 15 minutes, but then we'll have a discussion afterward to make changes / take suggestions about the operational aspect of RAVG. These folks -- the silviculturists -- are the main audience for this project. We're mapping fires in a rapid assessment time line and the maps show areas that have been deforested. These timber folks use them for various things, one being planning harvest units. After a fire burns through an area, they have an accelerated ability to make harvests on the dead trees that still have value. This window of opportunity doesn't last forever, however, so the rapid assessment is important.

I'm curious to see how I'm received and what / if any changes they suggest to the operational protocol I've set up.

It may be calming down

2007-09-05T18:37:00.001-06:00

I'd like to keep this blog more up-to-date, but I just don't seem to have much time at work to do that! This fire season, while not as completely crazy as last year, is still very crazy. The amount of fire in Idaho and Montana is staggering. I can't believe the number of fires or the size of those fires. It has been very active.

I am going up to Missoula next week for a meeting on Tuesday and field work on Wednesday and Thursday. It'll be a nice break from the computer and fire mapping. I don't think I'm going to work any more than I absolutely have to while up there. I hope to find some time to hit the golf course. We'll see.

One of the recent fires was the Castle Rock Fire that burned adjacent to Sun Valley Ski Resort near Ketchum, ID. One of the things that always intrigues me are the pictures that come from these fires. This first example is common: signs of "Thanks" and "We love firefighters" all over towns. I've seen them when I've traveled.

Another example here is of the structure protection these firefighting agencies do for private and public property. They wrap the structures in tin foil (not literally) to reflect as much heat as possible. It's quite the site to see these "shake and bake" structures. These pictures are courtesy of Inciweb.

Heavy Fire Activity in Montana

2007-08-21T17:21:00.001-06:00

Yesterday was one of those days...mapping fires all day long. On Friday, Landsat 5 captured a bunch of land in Idaho and Montana that is burning and I got the imagery over the weekend. I decided against coming in over the weekend, so it made my Monday long.

I mapped the following fires: Rattlesnake, Jocko Lakes, Skyland, Ahorn, Fool Creek, Chippy Creek, and Brush Creek. I've now mapped 11 fires in Region 1 (northern Idaho and all of Montana) for over 500,000 acres. Each fire I've mapped averages 49,000 acres! These aren't little piddly guys!

I'm still awaiting cloud- and smoke-free imagery of the East Zone, Cascade, and Landmark Complexes in Idaho. Those guys combine up to another 400,000 or so acres.

The graphic here shows the general location of most the fires I mapped yesterday.

Boundary Waters!

2007-08-14T09:46:00.000-06:00

I've returned from my trip to the Boundary Waters. What a great place to visit! We spent some time in the District Office discussing fire support and our field protocol. The District Office is right on Lake Superior in Grand Marais, MN. The water moderates the temperatures and the town was very pleasant. This was my first time seeing and touching Lake Superior, so it was a treat.

We spent 4 days up in the Boundary Waters gathering data on about 40 field plots. What a cool trip. I preselected 32 plots and we broke up into a few teams to get to as many as possible. We'd canoe to an area close to the plot location and then hike up the burned, rocky landscape to get to the points. It was a great experience. We spent most our time on Sea Gull Lake, which was great for us. The water was smooth and felt fantastic. It was a great lake to swim in, too.

The burned areas were very unique. They had a storm in 1999 they call the "Blowdown" that snapped and killed thousands of trees. This created a huge fuel load just waiting to burn. Well, those burns have come. Some of those burns have been quite severe, even burning down to bedrock. It was very interesting seeing the effects of the fire on these areas. Cool place to visit.

2007-08-02T08:16:00.001-06:00

I'm heading to the Boundary Waters in a few days. We depart SLC Sunday morning and will arrive in Grand Marais, MN, later that day. I've spent time this week working on a plot sampling strategy based on the dNBR and access points. We will be towed in to the Jap Lake Portage and then will be dropped off with our canoes. We will split up into two groups. One group will hike up the Jap Lake Portage and gather samples along the trail. Another group will canoe to another part of the lake and hike in from the shore. I'm very excited to see this landscape and to done a field trip like this and get paid to do so. How sweet.

Below is a graphic showing what I've been working on. The blue line represents a 750m buffer around Sea Gull Lake. We figure we can't get much farther off the shoreline without a trail and without wasting all day bushwacking. The grey lines are the Cavity Lake Fire perimeter. The black lines are trails or portages between lakes. The orange blocks are areas we figure are good sampling locations. When we first get there, we get to take a float plane up in the air and fly over all the fires. Pretty sweet. We're all pretty excited.

It's pretty active out there

2007-07-20T08:12:00.001-06:00

I opened the Active Fire Maps this morning and just laughed. The Western US has measles! This, mixed with an article on CNN yesterday, reflect the crazy active week of fires we've had. CNN said we've had 1,000 new wildfires ignite since Monday of this week. How insane.

I've got a number of fires on my plate all over the west right now. Everyone's asking for map products. If only we had more sensors.

Here's the large incidents map from this morning. 84 fires listed at 500 acres or greater. Poor Nevada. They have burned a few years in a row.

Day 3 on the Neola North Fire

2007-07-12T19:19:00.000-06:00

I've been on the Neola North Fire for a few days now. Today was spent completely in the "office" -- actually Mrs. Saxon's classroom in the Roosevelt Elementary. This has been an interesting experience. I spent most of today making map products and doing number crunching for the various specialties here on the fire.

For example, the folks doing the post-fire vegetation assessment were interested in vegetation mortality by ownership by vegetation group. We learned that about 4,000 acres of Lodgepole Pine burned on this fire, most of it on Forest Service lands, but only about 1/4 of it was high severity (> 75% of the vegetation on a particular site died).

It has also been good to see how the BARC product is used in the process. I think I could do this on a real assignment if asked. However, I don't think it'd be very easy to do it due to family and work needs. It'd be very difficult to give up 2 weeks for a fire assignment. And because I'm a contractor, I don't get the fancy overtime pay the rest of them get!

On Assignment - Neola North

2007-07-11T16:27:00.000-06:00

I'm currently on a fire BAER assignment for the Neola North Fire in eastern Utah. I'm basically here as a trainee where I'm watching and learning. However, I am doing some of the mapping for the incident here on site. This is a DOI BAER team and they not only require a soil burn severity map, but a vegetation mortality map as well. I utilized the RAVG (RdNBR) technique for that and it worked out very well. I was pleased with the results.

There is another Landsat collect tomorrow and we'll get it if it's clear. If it comes in clear, we'll hopefully wait for the image late tomorrow night, download it, and process it here. Then I'll make the new BARC map and new veg products. They can get by without a new version, but a new version will help. I have my doubts we'll get a clear image. There have been lots of clouds over the burn scar today and yesterday.

We drove the whole fire perimeter today and I got to see most the fire. It was fun to see that.

On a BAER team...

2007-07-04T18:29:00.000-06:00

We are officially planning the logistics for our trip to the Boundary Waters on the Superior National Forest. We will visit the Cavity Lake and Ham Lake fires to gather plot data. We're going to gather CBI (composite burn index) information at each plot to build up the existing database across the country of these plots.

I also will probably join the BAER team on the Neola North Fire on the south slope of the Uintas. Annette Parsons was called to be on the team and in speaking to her, I realized that this would be a great opportunity to be on an actual BAER team and learn the ropes of how things happen on that end. All I ever typically do is support the team from my cubicle and don't see the big picture very often. This should be a good opportunity. Looking forward to spending a few days up in Duchesne County.

2007-07-02T10:43:00.001-06:00

Well, it took till July for things to start cooking. We're now tracking about 8 fires that we could potentially map for BAER teams. We mapped the Angora Fire (Lake Tahoe) last week. I made this 3D overlay in Google Earth and sent this to the incident. You can easily see how the fire burned over subdivisions. The problem with living in the trees in the Western US is fire danger. You just never know.

Travels

2007-06-19T17:15:00.000-06:00

I've been fortunate at my job to travel occasionally. Some people have jobs that require them to travel way too much. Some people have jobs that don't have them travel at all. I feel like I've got a perfect mix. Just enough to rack up SkyMiles but not so much that my wife starts missing me. I've compiled a list of all the places I've traveled on the company dime since my hire date (Jan. 2003):

Albuquerque, NM – Regional BAER Coordinator’s Meeting
Speaker
February 2004

Denver, CO – ESR/BAER Implementation Workshop
Speaker
April 2004

Phoenix, Safford, Payson, AZ – Field sampling BARC
August 2004

Spokane, Chelan, Wenatchee, Leavenworth, WA – Field sampling BARC
September 2004

Sioux Falls, SD – ASTER Workshop
September 2004

San Diego, CA – Watershed Management Conference
Poster Presentation
November 2004

Portland, OR – BAER burn mapping workshop
Co-host
January 2005

Denver, CO – BARC training workshop
Instructor
May 2005

Sioux Falls, SD – MTBS kickoff meeting
August 2005

Lewiston, ID and Walla Walla, WA – Field sampling BARC
September 2005

Ogden, UT – R4 Integrated Resources Workshop
Speaker
January 2006

San Diego, CA – Regional BAER Coordinator’s Meeting
Speaker
February 2006

La Grande, OR – BAER team leader refresher
Speaker
June 2006

San Diego, CA – 3^rd International Fire Ecology and Management Congress
Speaker
November 2006

Missoula, MT – BAER team member refresher
Speaker
June 2007

A good mix overall, if you ask me. I will be adding to this list this summer with a great trip planned to the Superior National Forest. Sounds like a sweet trip.

Minne-sota, here we come

2007-06-12T17:25:00.001-06:00

I officially started planning a trip to the Superior National Forest for July or August today. I've mapped nearly 100,000 acres of burn scar up in the Boundary Waters and felt it appropriate to make a field visit to calibrate my mapping efforts with what we see on the ground.

It sounds like we'll take at least 4 people up there for this trip and it should be lots of fun. It'll be great to visit a new area of the country and also to see how our data products fit into their management objectives.

But seriously, the Boundary Waters! How cool! I've loved canoeing since I was a young Boy Scout and am anxious to give it a try in these famous waters. Looking forward to this trip!

I'm still alive!

2007-06-08T08:47:00.001-06:00

I haven't posted for a long time on this blog, but I've been swamped at work! Fire season began in earnest -- but then it stopped again. I haven't had a new fire of interest for about 2 weeks now. Still only one fire in Region 3: the Promontory Fire on the Tonto NF. It burned about 4,000 acres right on the edge of the Mogollon Rim.

We've been trying to get RAVG up and running. The biggest hurdle so far has been the data prep side of things. I'm having to get veg data from each and every western forest, then recoding from cover type to something more general that we're calling regional forest types. It's been a struggle. Lots of coordination with the forests.

Two of us are going to Missoula, MT, next week to present at a BAER team refresher training. We've been asked to take about 45 minutes in our presentation that will be geared toward team members (I presented at one last year geared toward BAER team leaders in LaGrande, OR). One of the things I'll be discussing is the 3D application side of display and this graphic is what I'm adding to my PPT slide. Pretty spot just west of Bonner's Ferry, ID on the Idaho-Panhandle NF.

Here we go again

2007-05-17T17:38:00.000-06:00

Fire season has begun.

I've already mapped two fires and both were in FS region 9: Pioneer in Cable, WI, and Ham Lake on the Superior NF. I actually wish we hadn't had any fires yet because I'm still super busy. MTBS is right in the thick of PNW mapping. We have nearly 700 fires mapped out of 1,600. Still lots of work to do, but we are moving along at a good clip.

Tony, Annette, and I just finished a training course this week. We held a webcast version and an instructor-led class where we teach BAER team members how to use and adjust BARC data. The webcast went surprisingly well. The really nice thing is that in the survey (only 8 out of 12 took it), all 8 gave us the highest ranking possible for "Instructor's knowledge of subject." Guess that means we know what we're talking about. Or that we can fake it well enough.

In the meantime, RAVG is lagging behind. I'm in the data collection mode right now in the 5 free minutes I have a day and am attempting to gather vegetation data from each individual forest across the West. What a mess. Once Tony gets married, he should be able to provide some assistance. That will be much needed and I'm just swamped!

It Ain't Rainin' in Georgia!

2007-05-09T10:57:00.000-06:00

I get asked occasionally about the fires burning in Georgia and Florida. People ask if I've been mapping them. While I have been tracking them, I've not been asked to do any mapping. These fires weren't burning on FS lands. Well, that is until today. One of the fires has now started burning on the Osceola NF in Florida. Now, I'm not sure I will get asked to help map it because they don't really do BAER down there. But I am tracking!

This is an image from this morning's Active Fire Maps.

No Borat here...

2007-04-23T17:26:00.000-06:00

Today we had 4 visitors to our office. Two were from Kazakhstan, one was an interpreter from D.C., and the 4th was the liaison/driver for the visitors. The Kazak visitors were the heads of the Forestry Division in Kazakhstan and were getting ideas about how to use GIS and Remote Sensing more efficiently in their forests. I got to give my song and dance. These kinds of visits are fun. I've done similar presentations to visitors from NGA (National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency), China, Senator Jake Garn, and lots of other state or private agencies. Fun times.

More Info BAER, RAVG, and MTBS

2007-04-19T21:00:00.001-06:00

I want to spell out each of the three programs mentioned in the post below. I’m involved with three programs: BAER, RAVG, and MTBS. All are related, and all have national application.

BAER: I create maps representing soil burn severity for emergency assessment for BAER (Burned Area Emergency Response) teams. They use my product (which I call the BARC, or Burned Area Reflectance Classification) in models to come up with a final product that shows burn severity in terms of hydrologic response. In other words, BAER teams are interested in how the soil will react to a weather event following a wildfire.

I provide this service for emergency assessments, which means I do this as close as possible to fire containment. BAER teams only have 7 calendar days to make their whole assessment, and my map products are an integral part early on in the process.

RAVG: This is a new program that we’re just now starting to implement nationally. In previous years, Region 5 (California) has been creating maps of vegetation severity (mortality) following a wildfire. The folks interested in this product are really silviculturists and are interested in salvageable timber. The idea here is that within 30 days (rapid assessment rather than emergency assessment) of a wildfire, I’ll create a map similar to the BARC but using a slightly modified algorithm (RdNBR – or Relative differenced Normalized Burn Ratio) as this is a map tailored to vegetation mortality, not soil condition.

We will do this on all fires on Forest Service lands greater than 1,000 acres. There is obvious synergy here with the BAER program, although with the relaxed timeframe, RAVG can afford to wait for better imagery where BAER can’t.

MTBS: This program has been going on for over a year now. The idea here is very similar to RAVG, but on an extended assessment approach. This means that if the fire burns in 2005, we will wait until the peak of green in the next growing season (typically spring 2006, depending on vegetation type) to map its effects. Like RAVG, we will map all fires greater than 1,000 acres in the west (west of 97 degrees longitude) and all fires greater than 500 acres in the east. We will do this for current year fires as well as all fires back to 1984 (to leverage the Landsat data archive).

This is a huge project because we have to select pre- and post-fire Landsat scenes for every fire that meets our size threshold back to 1984. Then we have to process and manage these data. And we have to map the fire perimeter and severity (like we would for RAVG – vegetation response) for each fire. Like I said, this is a huge project.

RAVG'ing BAERs!

2007-04-19T14:07:00.000-06:00

Boy, work has gotten busy. I've been given more responsibility. In our office, there are federal employees and contractors. There is a really good working relationship between the two, but the feds run the joint. I'm currently involved with three projects: BAER, RAVG, and MTBS. BAER is my #1 priority and what will keep me the most busy. RAVG (Rapid Assessment of VeGetation condition after wildfire - pronounced "ravage") is very similar to BAER, but for a different audience and slightly different output. I will be managing that program as well. MTBS (Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity) is a huge project where we're mapping the fire severity of every fire greater than 1000 acres since 1984. I am the "leader" of the contractors for this project.

So, three huge projects, and I'm heavily involved in all of 'em. I'm coordinating the work of 5 other analysts for MTBS and I have another analyst helping with RAVG and BAER. I guess they call this mid-level management. Wohoo! I've arrived! Ugh.

Currently, MTBS is taking about 95% of my time. We have a lot of work to do and I'm trying to take on responsibilities previously placed on one of the federal empolyees. I've been very busy in the last few days updating our nationwide fire occurrence database for all fires between 1984 and 2006. It's been a big task, often tedious, and often frustrating. But I've made progress.

I'll write more later when I get some time.

2007-03-26T17:29:00.000-06:00

This may be the last update on my Boise Basin project. I submitted the 1987 vegetation classification to my cooperator this morning. To make this product, I first created a NDVI change product and found areas of significant change. In areas that didn't fit the "significant" threshold, I used the 2002 veg layer. In areas of significant change, I burned in the 1987 classification. It was an interesting way to do it and probably eliminates a lot of noise you'd otherwise encounter.

This project, while frustrating because of having to start over a few times, was a good experience in stats. I got to create regression equations for an image rescaling effort and I also did my first accuracy assessment where I computed map accuracy and kappa.

Boise, MTBS, Wildfires!

2007-03-16T17:58:00.000-06:00

A quick update on Boise:

I finished the image registration, NDVI, NDVI differencing, and veg classification. These data were all sent to the cooperator. After about a week, I got an email asking me to re-look at using the 1987 image I previously rectified and used. He admitted to eating crow about this because he realized the clouds in his image were creating more problems than anticipated.

So now it's back to square 2. Nearly starting over. Again.

In other news, I'm busy busy busy with MTBS. We finished mapping and reporting all 2004 fires in the U.S. greater than 1,000 acres. I'm in the middle of mapping fires along the Oregon-California border between 1984 and 2003. I'm amazed at how big the 1987 fire season was in this location. It's incredible!

There was a wildfire last week in Southern California. It wasn't on Forest Service lands, so no request came in. It did burn 2,000 acres, however. We could be gearing up for another fire season. Personally, I could use a few months break still.

Progress for Boise

2007-02-24T15:52:00.000-07:00

I've been doing a project for the Rocky Mountain Research Station (RMRS) in Boise, ID, recently. Parts of it have been extremely frustrating, but the overall point of the project is somewhat interesting. The RMRS is attempting to model stream surface temperature based on the radiation each stream receives from the sun. The logic is that a dense canopy (forested) over a stream or river will block a lot of the direct sunlight and therefore not influence the stream temperature very much. In areas that have no canopy (like a recently burned area, for example), it is anticipated that the water there will be more influenced by the direct sunlight.

We're trying to see if this idea will work with moderate-resolution satellite imagery like Landsat. I'm personally a little skeptical because image registration is so important when studying riparian areas. If the image alignment is off even one pixel, you may completely miss the boat (hah, that was punny, wasn't it?).

I completed a NDVI change product between two dates (1989 and 2002) and a vegetation classification of the 2002 image today. The NDVI change was a little fun because I had to radiometrically correct the 1989 NDVI image to match the 2002 image. I'd never tried that derived image layers, such as a NDVI. I created it by computing a Model II regression line capturing the relationship between temporally invariate clusters in both dates. My r-squared wasn't very good (probably due to image mis-registration), but it was fun to try this.

Project frustrations

2007-02-08T17:34:00.000-07:00

When I was in San Diego in November giving a talk, someone from the Boise Rocky Mountain Research Station (FS) heard my talk and decided they needed some suggestion or work done for them. They are trying to map stream temperature as a function of sun radiation. Instead of measuring radiation across their whole study area, they want a vegetation map and will model radiation based off vegetation canopy.

They called us up and we set up a contract to do the image processing for them. Since I was their contact, the project was handed to me. Simple enough project, we thought and should be able to get it done in 4 weeks.

RMRS provided us a project plan / procedures to follow. They obviously put a lot of time and effort into this as it was very specific. However, as I began working on the project, I deviated a bit from the written procedures. Specifically, I secured better (I thought) imagery than what he provided me. The imagery I got was much easier to work with and provided better results.

After doing a sizeable chunk of work, he alerted us that he wasn't happy with the direction this project was going. We talked it over with him and it turns out he isn't interested in our input; basically, he just wanted a hired monkey to push the buttons exactly as he outline them.

So I had to start over. Ugh. It's been a pain and working with his imagery has created more problems that it will ever solve.

No more FRCC?

2007-01-26T15:40:00.000-07:00

I'm done with the FRCC maps. I think. Just last week, another call came in from the Washington Office requesting analysis this time instead of pretty pictures. They asked for the number of acres of FRCC 1, 2 and 3 within Forest Service boundaries. That was more of a hassle than you'd think. The FRCC layers are broken up into 66 separate zones, so nationwide analysis requires some work. I got it done and submitted and hope to be done with these things for the time being.

We're scheduling an MTBS meeting with our cooperators (EROS, Glacier NP, NIFC, UofMontana, and R5 Fire and Aviation) in a month or so. The problem is that it looks like the meeting will be held away from SLC (requiring us to travel) and my wife will be just about 9 months pregnant at that point. I don't think I'll be traveling. I think I'll skip this meeting.

Cookies!

2007-01-25T08:15:00.000-07:00

I've recently been helping some folks in a habitat modeling exercise. The people I've been working with are concerned about the effect wildfire has on certain habitats and therefore need continuous (not thematic) maps of severity. To do this, I create the dNBR and deliver that to the people in need. Well, most of the dNBRs have already been created through my BAER work during the fire season. However, Chris Forristal, U of Montana, needed some data for a fire we hadn't done yet. I secured some imagery, created the dNBR, delivered it to Chris, reprojected to something he could use, and etc. He was very grateful and even made a comment in an email "Where do I send the fruit basket?" I responded, "Fruit? I want cookies!" I was totally kidding, and Chris knew it as well.

I walked into work this morning and on my desk was a basket of cookies and a not from Chris saying "Thank you for your help!" I was surprised and please at the gesture. I also got a good laugh out of it all. Thanks, Chris, for the entertainment and treats this morning.

Alaska Landcover

2007-01-10T10:53:00.000-07:00

We are at the reporting phase for 2004 fires to meet requirements for the MTBS project. We've agreed to report the number of fires, by severity class, by land ownership, by 4th-level HUC, and by landcover. The only thing that has been holding us up is securing (or creating...) a good landcover layer for Alaska. We got NLCD-like data from Ducks Unlimited, NPS, and the State BLM in Alaska, but no two layers are exactly the same.

For our reporting to work (think automation...), we need all the landcover to be coded exactly the same, whether we're talking about CONUS or Alaska. So I've spent the last few days bringing in all the Alaska landcover data we have and recoding them to match NLCD 2001 parameters. It's been quite a manual hassle because I'm not able to batch more than two at a time. I'm nearly done and then we've got to reproject them all to Alaska Albers. They came in Albers NAD27, Albers WGS84, Albers NAD83, and UTM. Nice consistent data product, eh?

Making AMLs

2007-01-05T19:41:00.000-07:00

I've been very busy lately with the MTBS project. This project is significant: we're mapping every fire larger than 1,000 acres that has burned since 1984. It will continue until 2010 and will include over 16,000 fires. To map these fires, we're acquiring pre- and post-fire Landsat imagery, creating a dNBR, heads-up digitizing the fire perimeter, and then manually thresholding the severity classes in the dNBR to create a final 5-class thematic vegetation severity layer. Many phases of this project are very time consuming and tedious, but will yield very useful information to policy makers.

There are a lot of byproducts from this project that include many automation scripts and models written mostly by a co-worker at RSAC, Brad Quayle. One of them takes the imagery, perimeter, and thresholded severity layer and converts them all to GRID and coverage format (from TIFF and shapefile), then to Adobe Postscript, then to JPEG for publishing purposes on a website. The script takes an input as the year of the fire and then searches through all fires in a year we've mapped and creates the necessary JPEGs. It isn't a super fast script, but it is automated.

I figured it'd be nice to adapt that script for my BAER purposes. With every fire I map, I distribute GIS layers of the imagery and BARC products. I also make screen shots of all the data and include those JPEGs as well (for folks who want to look at the data without having to load them in GIS software). So I spent a good portion of the day today editing the script making it work for my data. It took some work and things that were working perfectly for the MTBS data weren't working for my BAER data (why? I have no idea and it made no sense). Finally, I got a working version before I left work today. The script requires the fire name, prefire image date, and postfire image date as inputs (arguments) to the script. The script is actually an AML and it was fun making it work today.

I can't write many AMLs from scratch, but I have no problem adapting existing ones to meet my needs. I did a similar thing for my metadata creator that I absolutely love and that saves me much time and sanity (making metadata is typically a pain the rear...).

FRCC and Mega Fires!

2006-12-20T16:30:00.000-07:00

Fire season is long gone, but I've been busy! I've spent the last few days making a map for a national-level meeting of some Forest Service suits. The map shows all large wildfires (> 50,000 acres) between 2001 and 2006 draped over a layer called FRCC (Fire Regime Condition Class). FRCC is a byproduct, if you will, of LANDFIRE. The point of FRCC is to map, via 3 classes, the condition of the ecosystem as a function of departure from an earlier reference point. Class 3 is the one showing the greatest departure. Most of the Western U.S. is mapped as Class 3.

The idea of the map/poster I'm making is to help the suits visually see if there are any obvious patterns between FRCC classes and "mega" fires. My first thought? No. Mega fires happen all over the west regardless of condition class. There are just too many variables when we're talking about whether a fire becomes "mega" or not.

The graphic here provides a compressed look at the map. At this scale, the fire perimeters are hard to pick out, especially on this resampled, downsized version of the map. Look for the years and you'll notice the fire perimeter close by. The most vibrant parts of the FRCC layer on this map are those that intersect with Forest Service proclaimed boundaries.

Visitors this week

2006-12-07T16:37:00.000-07:00

This week brought 6 visitors to our office here in Salt Lake City. On Tuesday, we hosted 4 analysts from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) who are associated with some of the fire work we do. We gave them a tour of the building, presented some briefings about what we do, and etc.

Today, we had two visitors from the Taiwan Forestry Bureau. These two gentlemen came out to see how we use remote sensing to benefit the U.S. Forest Service. I got to brief both groups of visitors about the support I provide to BAER teams. I will say I like the Taiwanese visitors more...they brought gifts! I got a magnet, traditional necklace, and a sort of air freshner (liquid) that smells like pine sap. Apropos, eh?

Reviewer

2006-12-01T09:02:00.000-07:00

I got an email yesterday from Ivan Csiszar, a professor at the University of Maryland. I guess he's on the board of the International Journal of Wildland Fire and plays a role in editing and approving submitted articles for the journal. He attached an article to the email asking me to review it. Here's what he said:

I write to ask if you would be willing to review the following paper, which has been submitted to the International Journal of Wildland Fire:
Manuscript Number: WF06138
Title: Soil erosion trend analysis using multi temporal Landsat imagery

Authors: J. Marquínez, E. Wozniak, S. Fernández A and R. Martínez

I would need your comments within four weeks, if at all possible. If you are unable to review this manuscript, or it is outside your area of expertise, could you please suggest an alternative reviewer.
I am grateful for the time you give to this request. Thank you.

Oh, I almost forgot, he called me "Dr. Clark." Doesn't he know I'm not even a Master yet?

Back from San Diego

2006-11-20T08:53:00.000-07:00

I've returned from the conference and am glad to be home. The conference was large and well attended. Roughly 1,000 people attended the conference and there were 10 concurrent sessions. One of the nights, the media was invited and they produced some "news", like this article here from the USA Today.

My presentation went very well and I wasn't even that nervous at all. It's safe to say that presenting 2-3 times a week in class helps in the preparation for making presentations at actual conferences.

I was sick the whole week in San Diego, so the experience wasn't as good as it could have been, but I heard some good talks regardless. There's talk the next International Fire Ecology Congress will be in Jackson, WY. I'll try to take my wife to that one.

What? I forgot it?!

2006-11-15T22:32:00.000-07:00

Hah...funny story. I'm presenting at the 3rd International Fire Ecology Congress in San Diego this week. My presentation is on Thursday afternoon. It's Wednesday night now and I was planning on going through it tonight to practice. I pulled my laptop up and realized that I left my presentation on my desktop computer back in Salt Lake City. I didn't bring it with me! I have no presentation!

Luckily, I emailed it to someone last Friday and I was able to call him and have him send it back to me. So, I'm slowly (!) downloading the PPT via my dialup internet connection here at the hotel. It's a good thing technology allows me to fix my mistakes fairly easily. Whew!

Back in the swing of things

2006-11-08T08:53:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted for a few weeks because I've been on vacation. I've just returned from beautiful Maui and was very happy to be gone. Just as I left, the Esperanza Fire was burning, killing firefighters and burning over homes. We did get a request to map it from the San Bernardino NF, but the BAER time constraints did not line up with our image acquisition dates. We ended up getting ASTER imagery, but haven't sent anything to the forest.

I'm on travel again next week. I'm attending a conference, the 3rd International Fire Ecology and Management Congress in San Diego. I'm giving a talk on Thursday about RSAC's support for BAER teams. It is a basic presentation and will be very easy to give. However, they only give us 15 minutes, including questions and transition time between speakers. I'll basically get to introduce myself and then have to sit down. The one nice thing is that I'm attending this conference for the whole week and will get a chance to actually sit back and relax and learn for most the week. I'm been to too many conferences where I show up for the day I'm presenting and don't really get to participate much in the rest of the proceedings. This may be a nice change.

Fun Landscapes

2006-10-20T11:36:00.000-06:00

I purchased a Landsat 5 TM scene for the Columbia Complex a few days ago. I typically spend a little time looking at the image before I do any modeling on it. I am constantly intrigued by the landscape in SE Washington and NE Oregon. This picture is an example. You can easily pick out the irrigated farms (bright green circles in upper left), while most the rest of the image represents dry farming, mostly wheat. It's a pretty cool landscape to drive through. I love the visible terrain in this image, plus the patchiness and different colors.

Done yet?

2006-10-18T11:08:00.000-06:00

I think I've done my last BARC and active fire request of the year. I got an email from the Okanogan-Wenatchee NF yesterday regarding the Tin Pan Fire. It started as a Wildland Fire Use fire that was let burn for a month or so. They finally began doing some suppression on the fella after it blew up a little (final size was ~9,200 acres). A few weeks after it was contained, the email came in saying they decided to do an assessment.

So, some numbers that probably reflect the whole year:

Fires supported: 115
Acres mapped: 2,470,856
$ Spent on imagery: $93,715
# satellite images used: 157
# of BARC layers created: 145

I only mapped 115 fires, but I had to do a number of them mulitple times. Our previous high for fires supported was 2002 when we did 72. Busy busy year. Other useless information:

Average fire size I supported: ~21,000 acres
# of fires greater than 100,000 acres: 7
Largest fire supported: Derby (199,500 acres)
Smallest fire supported: Grease (366 acres)
Fire mapped the most: Tripod (4 iterations)
First fire of the year supported: Sierra (ignition February 10)

There are two fires still uncontained in Northern California that will probably not get additional BARC products (each has been done already more than once) due to oncoming weather.

Stream Flows and Burn Severity

2006-10-13T15:58:00.000-06:00

I had an interesting meeting yesterday. A fella from the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center from NOAA - NWS visited inquiring about burn severity data. He's starting a project that will incorporate burn information to refine and better his flash flood potential models. He's been working on a few examples, but wasn't very familiar with the burn severity data he'd received. People would ask him questions about the severity product and say stuff like "What does the Forest Service do about burn severity mapping? What does it mean?" So he visited us.

The meeting was initially an idea one where we each learned what the other was doing and how we can synergistically work together. We're interested in his stream guage information for monitoring purposes (subsequent years following a fire) and he's interested in our burn severity data for his real-time modeling of flash flood potential. This could be a fun cooperation.

Day Fire - SPOT 5 image example

2006-10-08T12:13:00.000-06:00

It's Sunday morning and I'm at work. I just finished mapping the Day Fire in Southern California. It burned about 162,000 acres on the Los Padres NF. We've been trying to get some clear imagery of that fire but have been foiled by clouds and smoke. I scheduled a SPOT 5 attempt because it fit the tight time constraints better. The first attempt was Friday, Oct. 6 but it was completely cloudy. The next attempt was yesterday, Oct. 7. It was perfect. I was at the BYU football game when the fire incident called asking for an update. I told them I'd probably get the imagery by lunch today and out to them by 2. The imagery came in earlier than anticipated (thanks to SPOT Image Corp.) and I was able to get it out the field before noon. They were chomping at the bit due to some pretty tight time constraints.

Here are a few screen grabs showing what the imagery looked like. It's 10m spatial resolution (3x as fine as my typical Landsat image sources). The burn scar is the red/purple color; vegetation is green, water is black. Notice I-5 on the eastern edge of the wildfire. They had to close the freeway a few times while the fire threatened that side. One image is of the full extent; the other is zoomed in to full resolution. You can make out trees in this image. The southern portion of the fire was mostly chaparral while the northern portion got into more timber.

Pubs

2006-10-02T10:34:00.000-06:00

This is my first peer-reviewed publication...in a book, no less.