Ag Data Commons
Browse

Multi-scale analyses of wildland fire combustion processes: Large-scale field experiments – atmospheric pressure

dataset
posted on 2024-09-13, 16:25 authored by Warren E. Heilman, Nicholas S. Skowronski, Joseph J. Charney, Kenneth L. Clark, Michael R. Gallagher, John L. Hom, Shiyuan Zhong, Xindi Bian, Jason A. Cole, Matthew M. Patterson
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 air pressure data collected from nine pressure sensors (Bosch BMP 180/ BMP 280). Seven pressure sensors were located within the burn area, three were located on the west tower at approximately 2.5, 8.5 and 15 meters (m) above the ground and one on each of the four surrounding understory towers at approximately 2.5 m above the ground. Two pressure sensors were located on the control tower approximately 225 m north of the burn area mounted at approximately 2.5 and 19.5 m above the ground. The understory pressure sensors were installed to compare with the 10 x 10-m burns (small-scale field experiments). Pressure sensors were logged at 10 hertz (Hz) using CR6 dataloggers (Campbell Scientific). The pressure sensor data were used to examine fine-temporal resolution variation in atmospheric pressure associated with the passage of fire fronts. Data include temperature (degrees Celsius [°C]) and air pressure (millibars [mbar]).
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.
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. Please reference the burn layout and documentation data publication (Gallagher et al. 2023, https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2022-0089) as these data provide the sensor locations of each burn, a detailed description of data collected and a summary of the conditions during the burn periods.

Funding

USDA-FS

History

Data contact name

Nicholas Skowronski

Publisher

Forest Service Research Data Archive

Use limitations

These data were collected using funding from the U.S. Government and can be used without additional permissions or fees. If you use these data in a publication, presentation, or other research product please use the citation below when citing the data product: Heilman, Warren E.; Skowronski, Nicholas S.; Charney, Joseph J.; Clark, Kenneth L.; Gallagher, Michael R.; Hom, John L.; Zhong, Shiyuan; Bian, Xindi; Cole, Jason A.; Patterson, Matthew M. 2023. Multi-scale analyses of wildland fire combustion processes: Large-scale field experiments – atmospheric pressure. Fort Collins, CO: Forest Service Research Data Archive. https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2022-0093

Theme

  • Not specified

Geographic Coverage

{"type": "FeatureCollection", "features": [{"type": "Feature", "geometry": {"type": "Polygon", "coordinates": [[[-74.59739, 39.91794], [-74.59739, 39.91179], [-74.59215, 39.91179], [-74.59215, 39.91794], [-74.59739, 39.91794]]]}, "properties": {}}]}

Geographic location - description

The large-scale field experiment was conducted at the United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Northern Research Station Silas Little Experimental Forest, located in New Lisbon, Ne...

ISO Topic Category

  • climatologyMeteorologyAtmosphere
  • environment
  • biota

National Agricultural Library Thesaurus terms

Forestry, Wildland Management

OMB Bureau Code

  • 005:96 - Forest Service

OMB Program Code

  • 005:059 - Management Activities

Pending citation

  • No

Public Access Level

  • Public

Identifier

RDS-2022-0093