August 1986 Annaburro Station prescribed fires F19 and C064: Fire Dynamics Simulator evaluation data

This data publication contains data from two outdoor fire experiments conducted on August 18th and 20th of 1986 on a flood plain of the Mary River at Annaburro Station in Northern Territory, Australia. These two experiments are part of a more significant experimental effort conducted at the Annaburroo Station in July and August of 1986, involving 170 burn blocks of various sizes. Fuels at the study site were continuous open grasslands that were fully cured. The data publication contains oblique aerial photographs taken during the two experimental fires from a Bell 47-G helicopter. Additionally, the publication includes digitized coordinates of the fire lines from the aerial photographs. Tabular data contain measurements obtained from these coordinates of the maximum forward rate of spread of the fire, the fire's rate of spread, and calculated flame depth. The vegetation type in each burn block is documented along with fuel moisture content, height, and load. Ocular estimations of flame height, flame angle, and percent of grass curing are provided for each burn block. Additionally, wind speed, air temperature, relative humidity, and solar radiation measurements from a meteorological station near the study area's center are provided. Wind speed measurements recorded in an open area within 800 meters upwind of the burn blocks as well as wind magnitude measurements from a sensitive cup anemometer at each corner of the burn block are also included.
This data publication is provided to support the evaluation and development of fire behavior models, including three-dimensional, time-dependent fire behavior models. The lack of publicly available, co-located, synchronized, quality-assured measures of pre-fire, active fire, and post-fire conditions (i.e., integrated datasets) hinders our ability to advance fire models. This data package addresses this problem of data availability by providing one of the few datasets to evaluate and advance fire models, even though relatively simple, with limited geospatial information available for the data. The data provided in this publication were used to assess the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) for the development of the entire fire perimeter at these two outdoor fires. As such, it can also be used to compare results from other models to those obtained by the FDS. Wildfires and wildland-urban interface (WUI) fires are driven by complex physical and chemical processes operating on vastly different scales, whose interactions depend on the coupling between the atmosphere, topography, fire, and solid fuels. Both wildland and WUI fires are challenging, if not impossible, to study with full-scale repeatable experiments in the field due to their expense, safety implications, and variations in atmosphere, terrain, and fuel conditions. Yet, a long-standing need has been to improve our understanding of these fires. Suitably validated coupled atmosphere-fire models are one way to address these problems. Three-dimensional, time-dependent coupled fire-atmosphere models are based on approximations of the governing equations of fluid dynamics, combustion, and the thermal degradation of solid fuel. They require significantly more computational resources than the most commonly used fire spread models, semi-empirical or empirical. However, few public datasets exist despite extensive efforts over the past decade to acquire datasets to support the evaluation and development of fire models. Consequently, despite limitations as discussed in this metadata document, the data contained in this package demonstrate the possibility of providing such data to evaluate fire models from an effort conducted almost forty years ago.
For more information on the experimental effort conducted at the Annaburroo Station in July and August of 1986, see Cheney et al. (1993). For more information on fire models and the Fire Dynamics Simulator, see McNamara and Mell (2021) as well as Mell et al. (2007).