Measurements relating fire radiative energy density and surface fuel consumption – RxCADRE 2011 and 2012
Andrew T. Hudak A F , Matthew B. Dickinson B , Benjamin C. Bright A , Robert L. Kremens C , E. Louise Loudermilk D , Joseph J. O’Brien D , Benjamin S. Hornsby D and Roger D. Ottmar E
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations
A USDA Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station, Forestry Sciences Laboratory, 1221 South Main Street, Moscow, ID 83843, USA.
B USDA Forest Service, Northern Research Station, 359 Main Road, Delaware, OH 43015, USA.
C Rochester Institute of Technology, Center for Imaging Science, 54 Lomb Memorial Drive, Rochester, NY 14623, USA.
D USDA Forest Service, Southern Research Station, Center for Forest Disturbance Science, 320 Green Street, Athens, GA 30602, USA.
E USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Laboratory, 400 North 34th Street, Suite 201, Seattle, WA 98103, USA.
F Corresponding author. Email: ahudak@fs.fed.us
International Journal of Wildland Fire 25(1) 25-37 https://doi.org/10.1071/WF14159
Submitted: 11 September 2014 Accepted: 11 May 2015 Published: 28 July 2015
Abstract
Small-scale experiments have demonstrated that fire radiative energy is linearly related to fuel combusted but such a relationship has not been shown at the landscape level of prescribed fires. This paper presents field and remotely sensed measures of pre-fire fuel loads, consumption, fire radiative energy density (FRED) and fire radiative power flux density (FRFD), from which FRED is integrated, across forested and non-forested RxCADRE 2011 and 2012 burn blocks. Airborne longwave infrared (LWIR) image time series were calibrated to FRFD and integrated to provide FRED. Surface fuel loads measured in clip sample plots were predicted across burn blocks from airborne lidar-derived metrics. Maps of surface fuels and FRED were corrected for occlusion of the radiometric signal by the overstorey canopy in the forested blocks, and FRED maps were further corrected for temporal and spatial undersampling of FRFD. Fuel consumption predicted from FRED derived from both airborne LWIR imagery and various ground validation sensors approached a linear relationship with observed fuel consumption, which matched our expectation. These field, airborne lidar and LWIR image datasets, both before and after calibrations and corrections have been applied, will be made publicly available from a permanent archive for further analysis and to facilitate fire modelling.
Additional keywords: fire radiative energy (FRE), fire radiative power (FRP), fuel map, LiDAR, long-wave infrared (LWIR), RxCADRE.
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