Plotting Fire Weather Patterns

We created two notebooks, weather/notebooks/PlotHourlyWeather.ipynb and weather/notebooks/PlotDailyWeather.ipynb to extract temporal weather patterns at the locations of the largest 2020 wildfires in California. The goal for these notebooks was to show the conditions that preceeded each fire to develop a better intuition for the patterns that drive megafires at large scales.

We mapped these patterns on an hourly basis for the 10 largest 2020 wildfires, and then using daily 2021 data in those same locations for a subset of files. Here are some composite figures made from these weather plots. If the font is too small, try right clicking a figure to open it in a new tab.

All fires

Lightning complex fires

August Complex

North Complex

Santa Clara Unit Complex

Where are the data?

The hourly weather data can be found in gs://elmfire/inputs/weather/raster/.

These notebooks provided a good excuse to test out different visual styles, including light and dark salo themes and a new cfo theme. As a result of this experimentation, and due the number of weather patterns we mapped, these notebooks generate a lot of output images, which would have been too burndensome to track in this repository.

Instead, these rasters are saved in Chris's Google Drive and not tracked in this repository. You are welcome to re-run the notebooks to recreate the files at will.