New Jersey fuel treatment effects: 3-dimensional turbulence and temperature data

This data publication contains environment data collected as part of a Joint Fire Science Program project designed to collect landscape-scale fuels data before and after prescribed fires to quantify consumption, collect data for the parameterization and evaluation of computational flow-dynamics models for simulating fire behavior, and synthesize data for the evaluation of fuels treatment effectiveness. The data include 3-dimensional turbulence and temperature data from overstory towers in the New Jersey Pinelands (Burlington and Ocean Counties), measuring the fire environment within three separate fire experiments, Ex1, Ex2, and Ex3. These experiments were performed in 2013, 2014 and 2015, respectively. For each experiment, a control tower was constructed outside of the fire area and three towers inside of the fire area. Each of the intra-fire towers and the control tower were instrumented identically with an overstory sonic anemometer and a thermocouple array to sense the fire environment. The control tower also collected standard meteorological variables such as windspeed/direction, relative humidity, air temperature, and 10-hour fuel moisture.
The data provided here were collected as part of the Joint Fire Science funded project: “Evaluation and Optimization of Fuel Treatment Effectiveness with an Integrated Experimental/Modeling Approach.” From 2001-2011, approximately US $5.6 billion was spent on hazardous fuel reduction to treat an average of approximately 2.5 million acres per year across the United States. Because of the cost and complexity involved, there is a need for implementing treatments in such a way that hazard mitigation, or other management objectives, are optimized. Our work integrated extensive forest census measurements, remote sensing methodologies, three highly-instrumented fuel reduction treatments, and numeric modeling of fire spread to test the principals and physics behind fuel reduction treatments. These datasets provide measurements for the evaluation of fuel treatment effects and effectiveness.
Original publication date was 11/14/2017. Minor metadata updates were made on 11/17/2022.