Post-Fire: Assessing Downstream Effects on Hydrology and Water Quality (Thomas Fire)

  • Released Monday, December 12th, 2022
  • Updated Wednesday, November 15th, 2023 at 12:18AM
  • ID: 5052

Tracing Hydrological impacts of wildfires to understand downstream landslide risks; an example of the 2017 Thomas Fire, Southern California.

Wildfires leave behind a burn scar with little to no vegetation. Depending on the original biome type and severity of the fire, it may take years for the vegetation to regain its pre-fire biomass. Fire radiative power is an early observational indicator of interest to emergency response providers to prioritize areas with increased risk of mud-slides.

This visualization starts with a wide view of the West Coast of the United States. Regions that experienced fire are shown with red outlines. The camera then zooms in to the Thomas Fire in Southern California. This fire burned about 280,000 acres near Santa Barbara between December 2017 and January 2018. The visualization shows the extent of the fire with a red outline. Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) soil burn severity data is shown followed by the impact on evapotranspiration, then fire radiative power. The camera then zooms into a region near the coast and shows debris data (depicted as black areas with diagonal white lines).

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

Datasets used in this visualization

  • ID: 415
    Model Collected with GTOPO30 USGS
    See all pages that use this dataset

  • SRTM DEM

    ID: 481
    Collected with SIR-C
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  • Landsat MTBS

    ID: 1169
    Observed Data

    Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity

    Credit: https://mtbs.gov

    See all pages that use this dataset

  • BAER

    ID: 1170
    Observed Data

    Burned Area Emergency Response

    See all pages that use this dataset

  • Evapotranspiration

    ID: 1171
    Observed Data

    Evapotranspiration data were retrieved for the DisALEXI model from OpenET (openetdata.org) under a CCBY4.0 open data license.

    Credit: Melton, F., Huntington, J., Grimm, R., Herring, J., Hall, M., Rollison, D., Erickson, T., Allen, R., Anderson, M., Fisher, J., Kilic, A., Senay, G., volk, J., Hain, C., Johnson, L., Ruhoff, A., Blanenau, P., Bromley, M., Carrara, W., Daudert, B., Doherty, C., Dunkerly, C., Friedrichs, M., Guzman, A., Halverson, G., Hansen, J., Harding, J., Kang, Y., Ketchum, D., Minor, B., Morton, C., Ortega-Salazar, S., Ott, T., Ozdogon, M., Schull, M., Wang, T., Yang, Y., Anderson, R., 2021. OpenET: Filling a Critical Data Gap in Water Management for the Western United States. Journal of the American Water

    See all pages that use this dataset

  • Suomi NPP and NOAA-20 Fire radiative power

    ID: 1172
    Observed Data Collected with VIIRS
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  • Debris Flow Polygons

    ID: 1173
    Observed Data

    Credit: USGS

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