High temporal resolution information on burnt area is needed to improve fire behaviour and emissions models. We used theModerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) thermal anomaly and active fire product (MO(Y)D14) as input to a kriging interpolation to derive continuousmaps of the timing of burnt area for 16 large wildland fires. For each fire, parameters for the kriging model were d...

We present a comparison of techniques for estimating atmospheric emissions from fires using Australia's 2009 "Black Saturday" wildfires as a case study. Most of the fires started on Saturday the 7th of February 2009 (a date now known as "Black Saturday") and then spread rapidly, fanned by gale force winds, creating several firestorms and killing 173 people. The fires continued into early March,...

Crown fires associated with extreme fire severity are extremely difficult to control. We have assessed fire severity using differenced Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR) from Landsat imagery in 15 historical wildfires of Pinus halepensis Mill. We have considered a wide range of innovative topographic, fuel and fire behavior variables with the purposes of (1) determining the variables that influence f...

Forest harvest scheduling has been modeled using deterministic and stochastic programming models. Past models seldom address explicit spatial forest management concerns under the influence of natural disturbances. In this research study, we employ multistage full recourse stochastic programming models to explore the challenges and advantages of building spatial optimization models that account ...

Qualitative and semi-quantitative analyses presented in this article suggest that the massive fires caused by the crash of the planes into the World Trade Center Towers and the spillage of large amounts of jet fuel inside the buildings played a major role in their quick collapse on September 11, 2001. It is argued that the WTC fires, while unprecedented in form, magnitude and extent, resembled ...

Biomass burning is a major source of emissions to the atmosphere. Some of these emissions may change global climate. This paper uses combustion eff iciency as an independent variable for predicting emission factors for, among others, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane, and particulate matter. Other gases are correlated with the release of carbon monoxide. The release of nitrogen and sulfu...

Large recent fires in the western U.S. have contributed to a perception that fire exclusion has caused an unprecedented occurrence of uncharacteristically severe fires, particularly in lower elevation dry pine forests. In the absence of long-term fire severity records, it is unknown how short-term trends compare to fire severity prior to 20th century fire exclusion. This study compares historic...

It is becoming clear that fires in boreal forests are not uniformly stand-replacing. On the contrary, marked variation in fire severity, measured as tree mortality, has been found both within and among individual fires. It is important to understand the conditions under which this variation can arise. We integrated forest sample plot data, tree allometries and historical forest fire records wit...

Question: What was the role of fire during the establishment of the current overstory (ca. 1870-1940) in mixed-oak forests of eastern North America? Location: Nine sites representing a 240-km latitudinal gradient on the Allegheny and Cumberland Plateaus of eastern North America. Methods: Basal cross-sections were collected from 225 trees. Samples were surfaced, and fire scars were dated. Fire h...

Concerns about smoke from large high-intensity and managed lowintensity fires have been increasing during the past decade. Because smoke from large high-intensity fires are known to contain and generate secondary fine particles (PM2.5) and ozone precursors, the effect of fires on air quality in the southern Sierra Nevada is a serious management issue. Various process-based models have been deve...