The Synoptic and Mesoscale Evolution Accompanying the 2018 Camp Fire of Northern California

Abstract

Capsule The Camp Fire of November 2018 was associated with a strong, well-forecast, downslope wind event over the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada near Paradise, California.

Simulating Potential Impacts of Fuel Treatments on Fire Behavior and Evacuation Time of the 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California

“…The WRF simulation overestimated the relative humidity (RH) and wind speed for the time period between 06:30 and 18:00 PST. Overestimation trends were also seen in the WRF simulations by [28,29] that had similar horizontal grid spacing. Keeping the minor overestimations in mind, we decided to use the WRF output to create hourly weather stream data at two locations in the simulation domain (Figure 2).…”

“…Most of the burned area between Paradise and the ignition point had previously burned during the Butte Lightning Complex fire in July 2008, which was ignited by lightning strikes under hot and dry but much less windy conditions. Brewer and Clements [28] and Mass and Ovens [29] discussed the synoptic and mesoscale conditions during the Camp Fire.…”

“…The two weather stream locations (see Figure 1) were selected to spatially represent low-level north-northwesterly flow over the northern Central Valley and strong northeasterly winds descending the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. See [28,29] for detailed synoptic and mesoscale meteorological conditions. We used the observed fire perimeter at 18:00 PST on 8 November 2018 to help infer biases in the wind forcing data.…”

Tracking Wildfires With Weather Radars

“…To be specific, no systematic mapping of wildfires meets nowcasting needs with most infrared (IR) fire observations suffering from either a lack of spatial (e.g., GOES16/17 data at 2 km pixels) or temporal resolution (e.g., IR flights once daily, polar orbiting satellites 4 times daily). This data gap was tragically underscored during California's Camp Fire (Brewer & Clements, 2020; Mass & Ovens, 2021) wherein details of fire location and spread were largely unavailable to the public, confounding evacuation decisions with deadly consequences.…”

“…To be specific, no systematic mapping of wildfires meets nowcasting needs with most infrared (IR) fire observations suffering from either a lack of spatial (e.g., GOES16/17 data at 2 km pixels) or temporal resolution (e.g., IR flights once daily, polar orbiting satellites 4 times daily). This data gap was tragically underscored during California's Camp Fire (Brewer & Clements, 2020;Mass & Ovens, 2021) wherein details of fire location and spread were largely unavailable to the public, confounding evacuation decisions with deadly consequences.With this data gap in mind, the goal of this paper is to demonstrate the ability of fixed-location weather radars to track fire progression at high spatial and temporal resolution (e.g., hundreds of meters and tens of minutes). The motivation for this work is summarized in Figure 1, which shows fortuitously timed LANDSAT8 (hereafter L8) visible and IR satellite observations (Figure 1a) along with contemporaneous Next Generation Weather Radar (NEXRAD) radar reflectivity (Figure 1b) as the Camp Fire impacted Paradise, CA on 8 November 2018.…”