Multi-scale analyses of wildland fire combustion processes: Large-scale field experiments – burn layout and documentation

The United States Department of Defense (DoD) Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) funded project: Multi-scale Analyses of Wildland Fire Combustion Processes in Open-canopied Forests using Coupled and Iteratively Informed Laboratory-, Field-, and Model-based Approaches (RC-2641) conducted a large-scale (management-scale) field experiment during an operational prescribed burn to quantify how atmospheric dynamics across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales affect fire propagation, energy exchange, and fuel consumption. This experiment also provided an opportunity to fully examine how combustion related processes transfer across scales of particles and simple fuel beds in the laboratory, wind tunnel, small-scale, and operational prescribed burns as instrumentation used in small-scale field experiments was embedded in this experiment. In addition, the large-scale experiment also provides data necessary for simulation and model testing of coupled atmosphere-fire behavior prediction systems (e.g., WRF-SFire, WFDS, QUIC-Fire, FIRETEC) and coupled atmosphere-canopy-smoke dispersion prediction systems (e.g., ARPS-Canopy/FLEXPART). The large-scale field experiment includes data from a heavily instrumented ~12.1 hectare (ha) management-scale fire conducted at the Silas Little Experimental Forest in the Pinelands National Reserve (PNR) on March 13, 2019. This data publication contains detailed documentation and spatial vector data describing the data collected on a management-scale prescribed burn conducted on March 13, 2019, including a basic burn summary (time of burn, meteorological conditions, fuel load and ignition location), burn unit location and a plot layout describing sensor locations.<br>Many DoD facilities utilize low intensity prescribed fire to manage hazardous fuels, restore ecological function and historic fire regimes, and encourage the recovery of threatened and endangered species in the forests they manage. Current predictive models used to simulate fire behavior during low-intensity prescribed fires (and wildfires) are empirically based, simplistic, and fail to adequately predict fire outcomes because they do not account for variability in fuel characteristics and interactions with important meteorological variables. This study used a suite of measurements at the fuel particle, fuel bed, field plot, and stand scales to quantify how variability in fuel characteristics and key meteorological factors interact to drive fire behavior during low intensity prescribed burns. These experiments were designed to inform the development and evaluation of mechanistic, physics-based models that explicitly account for combustion, turbulent transfer, and energy exchange by coupling and scaling individual component processes. These datasets provide measurements to improve the understanding of, and ability to accurately predict, fire behavior under a wide range of management scenarios.<br>A summary of the SERDP Project RC-2641 can be found at the RC-2641 Project Overview (serdp-estcp.org): https://www.serdp-estcp.org/projects/details/a4a4642d-f2be-4e52-b678-454fe06afbc2/rc-2641-project-overview.

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Michael R. Gallagher (11846465), Nicholas S. Skowronski (19657009), Rory M. Hadden (5014691), Eric V. Mueller (11846462), Kenneth L. Clark (614443), Zakary J. Campbell-Lochrie (19659574), Carlos Walker-Ravena (19659577), Robert L. Kremens (19657342), Alexis I. Everland (19659580), Matthew M. Patterson (19659583), Jason A. Cole (19656994), Warren E. Heilman (19659568), Joseph J. Charney (19659565), Xindi Bian (19659586), William E. Mell (19657834), John L. Hom (19659571), Seong-kyun Im (19659589), Michael T. Kiefer (19659592), Shiyuan Zhong (19471893), Albert J. Simeoni (19657831), Ali Rangwala (19659595), Giovanni Di Cristina (19659598), Joseph Sietz (19659625)
Format: Dataset biblioteca
Published: 2023
Subjects:Environmental sciences, Smoke, fuel structure and loading, wind speed, biota, oxygen concentration, Wildland/urban interface, combustion, computational fluid dynamics, environment, carbon monoxide concentrations, fire spread, climatologyMeteorologyAtmosphere, prescribed burn, temperature, heat flux, fire behavior, Fire suppression, pre-suppression, aerodynamic drag, prescribed fire, wind direction, calorimetry, carbon dioxide concentrations, Prescribed fire, Fire, prescribed energy release,
Online Access:https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Multi-scale_analyses_of_wildland_fire_combustion_processes_Large-scale_field_experiments_burn_layout_and_documentation/27010402
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The United States Department of Defense (DoD) Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) funded project: Multi-scale Analyses of Wildland Fire Combustion Processes in Open-canopied Forests using Coupled and Iteratively Informed Laboratory-, Field-, and Model-based Approaches (RC-2641) conducted a large-scale (management-scale) field experiment during an operational prescribed burn to quantify how atmospheric dynamics across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales affect fire propagation, energy exchange, and fuel consumption. This experiment also provided an opportunity to fully examine how combustion related processes transfer across scales of particles and simple fuel beds in the laboratory, wind tunnel, small-scale, and operational prescribed burns as instrumentation used in small-scale field experiments was embedded in this experiment. In addition, the large-scale experiment also provides data necessary for simulation and model testing of coupled atmosphere-fire behavior prediction systems (e.g., WRF-SFire, WFDS, QUIC-Fire, FIRETEC) and coupled atmosphere-canopy-smoke dispersion prediction systems (e.g., ARPS-Canopy/FLEXPART). The large-scale field experiment includes data from a heavily instrumented ~12.1 hectare (ha) management-scale fire conducted at the Silas Little Experimental Forest in the Pinelands National Reserve (PNR) on March 13, 2019. This data publication contains detailed documentation and spatial vector data describing the data collected on a management-scale prescribed burn conducted on March 13, 2019, including a basic burn summary (time of burn, meteorological conditions, fuel load and ignition location), burn unit location and a plot layout describing sensor locations.<br>Many DoD facilities utilize low intensity prescribed fire to manage hazardous fuels, restore ecological function and historic fire regimes, and encourage the recovery of threatened and endangered species in the forests they manage. Current predictive models used to simulate fire behavior during low-intensity prescribed fires (and wildfires) are empirically based, simplistic, and fail to adequately predict fire outcomes because they do not account for variability in fuel characteristics and interactions with important meteorological variables. This study used a suite of measurements at the fuel particle, fuel bed, field plot, and stand scales to quantify how variability in fuel characteristics and key meteorological factors interact to drive fire behavior during low intensity prescribed burns. These experiments were designed to inform the development and evaluation of mechanistic, physics-based models that explicitly account for combustion, turbulent transfer, and energy exchange by coupling and scaling individual component processes. These datasets provide measurements to improve the understanding of, and ability to accurately predict, fire behavior under a wide range of management scenarios.<br>A summary of the SERDP Project RC-2641 can be found at the RC-2641 Project Overview (serdp-estcp.org): https://www.serdp-estcp.org/projects/details/a4a4642d-f2be-4e52-b678-454fe06afbc2/rc-2641-project-overview.