Using remote sensing and GIS techniques combined with weather and climate data to create a deeper understanding the wildfire Campfire in California

Schimmel/Conrades Science Center Atrium

Wildfires have devastated the West Coast time and time again. This project takes on multiple approaches to help understand different aspects of these fires, focusing on the wildfire Campfire. The Campfire started and ended in November of 2018 in Butte County California. The first portion of the project focuses on the weather and climate of this region in California. By understanding the weather and climate of a particular area and the time at which a wildfire starts you can start to identify optimal conditions where a fire could potentially breakout. Local weather data will be gathered to look at temperature, relative humidity, precipitation, and dew point. Climate data will be gathered and used to then help explain the reasons why/how the weather reached this optimal tipping point. The second aspect of the project heavily involved remote sensing techniques and analysis through the use of GIS software. Landsat-8 imagery was used for the mapping aspect. By utilizing certain spectral bands, from Landsat-8, one can delineate burn areas from other areas of land that were not affected by the wildfire. The USGS has burn area boundaries that will be used as a comparison. The third part of the project will focus more on the effects of the fire, total area burned, property loss, and impacts it had on the local community. The combined data provide substantial analysis of the wildfire Campfire and its effects.