Video Presentation
About the Data
2020 U.S. Fire Perimeters (data retrieved Oct 27, 2020)
Wildfire Perimeters - National Interagency Fire Center Open Data Portal, enriched with data from the National Large Incident Report.
These data are preliminary until the data is reviewed by scientists in early 2021.
Wildfire Points - Self produced, based on the same data as the wildfire perimeters.
California Wildfire History (data retrieved Nov 21, 2020)
Wildfire Perimeters - Cal Fire. These data have been reviewed and published, but the data are for the outer perimeters of the fire; in some cases, the entire polygon
area has not burned. For this reason, we consider the area of these polygons as "impacted", not burned.
California Counties - State of California. The area of each county was calculated with ArcGIS Pro, as were the total area impacted for the two
climate periods using the above CA wildfire perimeter data.
Top 20 California Wildfires - Cal Fire. Records before 1932 are less reliable, and there may have been large fires before this time. 2020 fire data is not final.
National Wildfire History (data retrieved Nov 21, 2020)
Total Wildland Fires for 1983 through 2019 National Interagency Fire Center.
Total Wildland Fires for 2020 National Interagency Fire Center. Note that the 2010-2019 data is different in this data set. It is unclear why this is the case.
About the Authors
Huy Tran
Undergraduate in Computer Science at the University of Utah
Undergraduate in Computer Science at the University of Utah
Master's in Geography Student at the University of Utah
Disclaimer
It is very important to note that the data in this project may not be perfectly accurate for various reasons. While the data is the best available, we had to remove insiginficant fires and simplify polygon vertices for storage reasons. The 2020 data has
not been finalized because the season is still active, and for historical data, the accuracy of mapping generally has increased over time thanks to satellites and modern GPS. This is not to say this is not good data or the trends shown
here are invalid - there is no doubt that wildfires are increasing in size. Instead, we hope this visualization intrigues the viewer to do their own fact finding and explore this increasingly important phenomena.