Multi-scale analyses of wildland fire combustion processes: Large-scale field experiments – terrestrial laser scans

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 terrestrial laser scans (TLS) data collected using a FARO Focus 3D X 330. A series of scans were taken around 4 (North, South, East and West) tall towers (TT) and 12 (KB1-KB9, S1, W1 and W2) Krem box towers (KT) for both pre- and post-burn conditions. The scans were subset to a 10 m radius around the TT and a 2 m radius around the KT towers. GPS coordinates were collected using a Trimble GeoXH 6000 handheld receiver and post processed to spatially reference scanned subsets. TLS data were used to map instrument locations, evaluate fuel characteristics, and evaluate changes in fuel loading.
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. These data were published on 06/01/2023. We discovered a few corrupt data files that were corrected on 05/21/2024: \TLS_KB_HgtDelta\Burn01_S1, \TLS_KB_HgtDelta\Burn01_W1, and \TLS_KB_HgtDelta\Burn01_W2.