Southern Plains Fires

Extremely dry soil, combined with periodic episodes of strong winds, unseasonable warmth, and very low relative humidity have lead to the high risk of wild-fires across portions of the Southern Plains from late December 2005 through mid March 2006. Numerous grass fires have burned in the region, causing loss of property and life in a few cases. This purpose of this web site is to show the spatial extent of the fires as mapped by satellite, and to provide comparison of surface conditions which may have been factors in the observed fire patterns.

Fire locations are from the GOES Automated Biomass Burning Algorithm (ABBA) produced at the Cooperative Instutute of Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS), University of Wisconsin-Madison. They are accumulated hourly and daily for display at the NOAA/SPC. For purposes of this study, fire locations have been accumulated over a period of days to compare with surface vegetation conditions, soil moisture, and population maps.

Table 1 and Movie 1 compare images of fire locations, vegetation index (NDVI as derived from MODIS), soil moisture estimates (from the NOAA Climate Prediction Center), and population densities. The evolution of modeled soil moisture can be viewed in Movie 2. Fire locations on each individual day are available in Movie 3.

Movie 2. Soil moisture (Dec. 2005, Jan. 2006, 20 Feb. 2006).

Click to view evolution in soil moisture and soil moisture anomalies.

Movie 3. Evolution of NDVI (Oct 2005 - May 2006).

Data is courtesy of Kevin Gallo (NESDIS) and Jeremy Merry (Science Applications International Corp) and the EROS National Data Center, USGS. To minimize cloud cover, these products are produced from composites of daily AVHRR scenes over 14-day periods. Areas lacking any clear skies are indicated in white. Water surfaces are shown in blue.

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Movie 4. Movie of fire locations on individual days (27 Dec 2005 - 18 Feb 2006) .

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Seasonal Fire Summary

Unfiltered
November 2005
December 2005
January 2006
February 2006
March 2006
Nov 2005 - Mar 2006

Table 2. Reanalysis (time filtered)

	2004-2005 season	2005-2006 season
Oct	X	X
Nov	X	X
Dec	X	X
Jan	X	X
Feb	X	X
Mar	X	X
Apr	X	X
Total	X	X

Movie 5. Animation of monthly fire composites and comparison of seasons from Table 2.
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Southern Plains Fires: Winter 2005-2006