Ag Data Commons
Browse
- No file added yet -

Multi-scale analyses of wildland fire combustion processes: Large-scale field experiments – three-dimensional wind and temperature

dataset
posted on 2024-09-13, 16:25 authored by Kenneth L. Clark, Michael R. Gallagher, Eric V. Mueller, Rory M. Hadden, Carlos Walker-Ravena, Zakary J. Campbell-Lochrie, Jason A. Cole, Matthew M. Patterson, Alexis I. Everland, Nicholas S. Skowronski
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 data collected from 22 sonic anemometers (81000v, R.M. Young Inc.). Fifteen sonic anemometers were mounted on 5 meteorological towers within the burn area and a 3 sonics were mounted on the control tower approximately 225 meters (m) outside the burn permitter to the north. Three sonics anemometers were mounted on each tower at approximately 3, 10 and 19 m above the ground. Four additional sonics where installed around the west tower at approximately 3 m to compare with the 10 x 10-meter burns (small-scale field experiments). Sonic anemometers were logged at 10 hertz (Hz) using CR3000 dataloggers (Campbell Scientific). The Sonic data were used to explore fine-scale patterns of vertical turbulence above flame fronts. Pre-fire data were used to quantify ambient wind conditions before and after fire front passage, turbulence, sensible (convective) heat fluxes, and momentum fluxes above flame fronts during fires. Data include sampled horizontal and vertical wind speed (meters per second [m/s]) and temperature (degrees Celsius [°C]).
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: Clark, Kenneth L.; Gallagher, Michael R.; Mueller, Eric V.; Hadden, Rory M.; Walker-Ravena, Carlos; Campbell-Lochrie, Zakary J.; Cole, Jason A.; Patterson, Matthew M.; Everland, Alexis I.; Skowronski, Nicholas S. 2023. Multi-scale analyses of wildland fire combustion processes: Large-scale field experiments – three-dimensional wind and temperature. Fort Collins, CO: Forest Service Research Data Archive. https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2022-0095

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

  • biota
  • climatologyMeteorologyAtmosphere
  • environment

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-2022-0095