On the road again

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

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

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!

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

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

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?

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.