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abstract
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The Global Fire Atlas of individual fire size, duration, speed and direction Andela et al. (2019) The Global Fire Atlas is a new freely available global dataset that tracks the daily dynamics of individual fires to determine the timing and location of ignitions, fire size and duration, and daily expansion, fire line length, speed, and direction of spread. Data are available in easily accessible GIS-layers and can also be explored online here and a detailed description of the underlying methodology is provided by Andela et al. (2019). The data provide unique insights in the environmental conditions that give rise to the world’s most extreme wildfires. The world’s largest wildfires were found in sparsely populated arid and semiarid grasslands and shrublands of interior Australia, Africa, and Central Asia. Strikingly, fires of these proportions were nearly absent in similar ecosystems of North and South America, possibly due to higher landscape fragmentation and different management practices, including active fire suppression. While the world’s largest fires occurred in more arid ecosystems, the longest fires burned for over 2 months in seasonal regions of the humid tropics and high-latitude forests. In these sparsely populated high fuel-load systems fires can continuously burn if weather conditions are favourable. Abnormal weather conditions often synchronized the occurrence of multiple extreme wildfires across larger regions. Global patterns of fire velocity were reversely related to fuel loads, and the highest fire velocities typically occurred in areas of low fuel loads.
These data have been downloaded from http://globalfiredata.org/pages/data/ [accessed 2020-11-17] and subset to NSW.
More information available here: http://www.globalfiredata.org/fireatlas.html
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