Historical California Wildfire Data

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) maintains historical data about wildfires in California. At present, this includes detailed GIS (Geographic Information System) files describing the geography (perimeters) of individual fires, although the CAL FIRE website also provides datasets with historical summaries of many fires over many years. CAL FIRE previously hosted an Excel spreadsheet containing these summary statistics of many fires, which we will be working with. You can download from our github repository if you have not already acquired it by cloning our repository (as described in Introducing Datasets). There is also some work analyzing these datasets by a USGS research scientist, hosted on that scientist's github site. More recently, the CAL FIRE website was reorganized to present those data in a slightly different format; if you'd like to work with that more recent data instead, you will need to modify some of the code presented here to accomodate the slightly different data format.

The spreadsheet contains information on California fires dating back to 1878, providing the following summary information for each identified fire (with some data fields missing for some fires):

• YEAR
• STATE
• AGENCY
• UNIT_ID
• FIRE_NAME
• INC_NUM (incident number)
• ALARM_DATE
• CONT_DATE (containment date)
• CAUSE
• COMMENTS
• REPORT_AC (reported number of acres burned)
• GIS_ACRES (number of acres burned as determined by analysis of GIS data)
• C_METHOD
• OBJECTIVE

In the following analyses, the data fields that will be of most interest to us are YEAR, AGENCY, ALARM_DATE, CONT_DATE, and GIS_ACRES.

Some of the material presented here involving the analysis and modeling of wildfire data was developed originally to support the NASA Data Intensive Research and Education Center for STEM at CSULA, through its partnership with XSEDE.