Deer Creek Resources

Here are some satellite images we have made to show fire effects on the North Complex/Bear Fire. Green areas still have foliage, tan and brown are barren. The Forest Service will use similar imagery to create and publish more authoritative, ground-truthed maps as part of their Burned Area Emergency Rehabilitation (BAER) process. These images are more of a visual reference.

As a followup to our previous post about fire severity, the interagency team evaluating fire effects on the South Zone of the August Complex has released their official soil burn severity map. Here is an excerpt from their press release. "The map shows that in the August Complex-South fire area, approximately 52% of the 521,256 acres analyzed by the BAER team is either unburned/very low (9%) or low (43%) soil burn severity, while 44% sustained a moderate soil burn severity, ...and only 4% burned at high soil burn severity." https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/article/7228/57844/ It's worth noting that publishing a map of nearly 800 square miles within a few weeks of the fire burning suggests pretty minimal ground-truthing, and this mapping should be taken with a grain of salt. Postfire assessments have a major focus on erosion and landslide hazards, so their main mapping products focus on fire effects on the soil, with less focus on the vegetation effects. Many places where all of the trees are killed, but still have their leaves and needles are are mapped as 'moderate' soil burn severity because the falling dead needles and leaves will help dissipate rainfall impacts and reduce erosion hazards this winter. These satellite-derived assessments are necessarily a landscape-scale snapshot. More info on Soil Burn Severity here: http://www.fs.fed.us/rm/pubs/rmrs_gtr243.pdf.

Today's post is about 'wildfire severity'. The 2020 August Complex Fires started as multiple lightning-fires in the Coast Range Mountains, between Highway 101 and Interstate 5. Over the past 2 months, the different fires have burned together, spreading across a million acres. Describing a fire in 'acres burned' doesn't really tell us anything about the impacts the fire has on the landscape. Fire ecologists and scientists describe fire effects in terms of the 'severity'. Low... severity fires generally stay on the ground, and leave larger trees and brush standing, while high severity fire usually kills all the above-ground vegetation and leaves behind black sticks and ash. High-severity fires often are at a higher risk for post-fire erosion. From the foothills of the Sacramento Valley to the top of 7,000 feet peaks, these fires have burned across an extremely wide variety of vegetation, geology, and terrain. And weather conditions have just as variable - ranging from hot winds and 100 degree days to sub-freezing mornings with heavy dew. There have been many other recent fires in the Coast Range, and these reduced fuel loads and, in many cases, lowered the severity of the 2020 fires. Some recently-burned areas within the million-acre boundary of the fire didn't burn at all. The result of all this landscape complexity is what fire scientists call a 'burn mosaic', or patchwork of different kinds of fire effects. These images show the August Complex Fire area on 10/9/2020. Red areas generally burned hot, removing most of the vegetation, while shades of green show remaining foliage.

Tonight's Wildfire Science post: As we get close to a milestone of 4 million acres burned in California, many news articles are hitting the press with headlines that describe the fires as 'tragic', 'devastating', or 'unprecedented'. While the fires have had an enormous emotional and physical toll for all of us who live in the State, with choking smoke, evacuations, and other major disruptions on top of Covid and political chaos, the jury is still out on how 'bad' all of the ...fire has been for the landscape and natural world. The fires burned across the full spectrum of California's vegetation types. Some of these areas, like conifer forests, will take generations to grow mature forest again, while other areas of grass and brush will have green grass and wildflowers on them within 6 months, and 8 foot tall brush within 2 years. The story of how the fires affected the land are complex, and describing the fire season by acreage alone tells us nothing about how severe the fires were in any given place, or why fire severity even matters. We need to broaden the conversation about fire's place on our wildlands, and to move away from loaded language that describes fire only as a force of destruction. Using acres-burned as a yardstick for how 'bad' a fire season was only works if you are assuming that fire is necessarily bad for the land. Is burning 2,000,000 acres of fire-adapted grass, brush, and oaks a bad thing? Lots of people are suggesting dramatically increasing the amount of prescribed fire we do each year. We'll be getting similar results from prescribed fires as we do from wildfires if we do them in fuel types like brush and oaks. We need new metrics for judging and describing how impactful fires really are. We hope our mapping, data, and discussions can help inform a new conversation about wildfire in California. In that vein, here is a breakdown of how many acres of each vegetation type have burned in California so far in 2020. Data from National Interagency Fire Center and Cal Fire's FRAP Program.

Tonight's wildfire science post is right in our back yard. These images were captured of the North Complex, in the North Fork Feather River Canyon, about 2pm, on 10/1/2020. WIldfires in 'The Canyon' are typically more influenced by slope than wind, and generally run uphill out of the Canyon, and then creep slowly across the hillside, or back downhill. When the main fire is high on the slope, rolling material starts spot fires below the main fire, and these make small high-in...tensity runs back up into the main fire, creating patches with more severe fire effects. Also, if fire is at the bottom of a slope which faces upcanyon, the strong downcanyon winds at night can cause a crown fire run on that particular slope, which often dies down once it is out of the direct wind. The same thing can happen with upcanyon afternoon winds. There is a saying 'Pyrodiversity makes biodiversity'. The wild, broken nature of the Canyon, coupled with the fact that fires can burn here for weeks or months, under a wide variety of conditions, make it a very pyrodiverse place. Also, The Canyon is notorious for rolling rocks and boulders down onto firefighters. If you asked the Plumas NF wildfire leadership on this fire if they have ever had to package up a fellow firefighter to get flown out after being hit with a rock, I am betting more than one would say yes. See more

Today's fire science images were captured yesterday, 9/29/2020, at about 2pm. They show the Zogg Fire, burning in Shasta County, California, and the North Zone of the August Complex, near Forest Glen, in Trinity County. On the Zogg Fire images, the 2018 Carr Fire perimeter is shown in red. #ZoggFire #AugustComplexNorthZone #ruthlake #forestglen

Why do the winds howl down the Feather River Canyon each night? And why are we concerned about fires spreading quickly there? The North Fork Feather River is the largest river in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. All of the cold air which falls off the high peaks at night rushes down the Canyon. #BearFire... #NorthComplexWestZone See more

This video shows an experimental wildfire prediction tool we're helping test. THIS VIDEO DOES NOT SHOW AN ACTUAL FIRE. Before the wind event earlier this week, the model said the scenario in the video had a 10% chance of occuring. It did not happen. We are providing our experience with large fire behavior and fire suppression to help guide the development of near-term wildfire forecasting tools as part of a fire science consortium led by the Spatial Informatics Group. We are... critiquing early versions of the fire spread models, and comparing their predictions to what is acutally happening each day during the 2020 California wildfires. These tools will help utilities assess potential spread for active wildfires, and to better target PSPS events, based on current and predicted fire weather and fuels conditions. One major limitation of this model is that the fuel loading and forest canopy information was captured before the Camp Fire, so the reductions in fuel loading that happened when the forest burned in 2018 are not considered in this simulation. If you want to run the models yourself, a BETA version of the Pyregence wildfire modeling tools are available to the public at http://pyregence.org

After a month of smoke, evacuations, and loss, it might seem a little edgy to talk about 'Good Fire', but it is the most important conversation we can have. Over the past decade, we are grateful to have been invited to work with native tribes and other locals NW California, helping put fire on the ground each fall in neighborhoods along the Klamath River. The people of the Klamath Mountains have not taken no for an answer. They have jumped an insane amount of hurdles to ass...ert their right to use fire as a tool. There is a culture of land stewardship in this place, where kids learn about fire ecology in elementary school, teens and young adults are fireline-qualified for prescribed fire, and over 100 people from all over the world descend every fall to learn how to burn. They have done a very a great job making some movies about the work they are doing to get in better relation with fire. We highly recommend checking out anything on the Klamathmedia Youtube channel. Here is a sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpglLhmwPMc&t=8s p.s. they are all super-busy up there right now keeping wildfires out of their neighborhoods, and taking care of friends who have lost their homes in the Slater Fire, so if you are a reporter who wants to call them up, watch their videos instead, or read any number of the dozens of great articles written about their work over the past decade.

Here is some fresh imagery of the #BearFire, captured 9/16/2020, at 2pm. These are 'false color' composite images that use infrared wavelengths of light to see through smoke and haze. The white line shows about 60 hours of fire spread, since midnight on morning of 9/14/2020. Most of the fire has not spread since then. Much of the fire's big run across industrial timberlands burned with great intensity. Shades of tan and brown are barren. ... Some of the areas deep in the Middle Fork Feather River appear to have underburned, and there is still intact foliage on trees in these areas. #northcomplexwestzone CAL FIRE CAL FIRE/Butte County

For today's game of satellite image roulette: The August Complex, to the west of our office in Chico, California, is now 'California's largest recorded fire'. It measures over 100 miles from tip to tip. The Mendocino National Forest covers a huge swath of mainly uninhabited land between Highway 101 and Interstate 5. Even with our best efforts to keep fire out of it, there have been many large fires there in the past century.... Imagine this place 200 years ago. We had dry lightning then, too, and fires would regularly burn for months across the same fire-adapted landscape. This happened for eons, and the forests survived and thrived. It's fire's home. These images were created from satellite data captured 9/14/2020, at about 2pm. Data credit: European Space Agency.

In today's satellite image roulette, the Creek Fire and SQF Complex Fires. This imagery is from 2pm, today, 9/13/2020. #creekfire #castlefire

The satellite imagery we have been sharing here is from a European Space Agency satellite that orbits any given area every 5 days. The swath is about 180 miles wide, so we have been sharing imagery from whatever pops up as a fresh scene. This evening's wildfire imagery is from our backyard. These scenes were captured earlier today, 9/11/2020, at 2pm. We used infrared bands from the satellite to see thru the heavy smoke to get a first look at the fire effects on the Bear Fire..., aka 'North Complex West Zone' fire. Blue areas are unburned, and vegetated. Shades of brown show the burn severity. There is very little active fire shown on this image. This doesn't mean the fire is out, but since the fire burned downhill with heavy winds, and also generally burned to many of the nearby ridgelines, there are fewer places where the fire can make uphill runs. Much of the remaining fire is backing downhill or flanking sidehill. As we mentioned in our post about the Creek Fire, these types of fire often result in lower-severity burning. While most of the area impacted by the fire appears to have burned with high severity, and this area covers an incredibly large area, one nugget of good luck might still be hidden under the smoke. It appears on this imagery some of the most remote forests in the area, deep in the canyons of the Middle Fork Feather River, south of Bucks Lake, were sheltered from the initial wind-driven run, and are still burning, with backing fire. Many of the deep canyon areas burned in other lightning fires in the past 21 years. Maybe some of the old-growth trees in these areas will survive? Time will tell. Imagery by Zeke Lunder, Deer Creek Resources, Chico, Ca. Data Credit: European Space Agency, 9/11/2020, 14:00hrs PST #northcomplexwestzone #BearFire #fireecology #wildfirescience #sentinel