FIRED (Fire Event Reconstruction and Discussion)

What this dataset is

FIRED provides event-level and per-day fire perimeter polygons for the conterminous United States and Alaska from November 2001 to March 2021. Daily footprints track fire growth through time, while event tables summarize ignition, containment, and size.

Quickstart

Get the stream (CubeDynamics grammar)

import cubedynamics as cd
from cubedynamics import pipe, verbs as v

fired_evt = cd.fired_event(event_id=21281)
clim = cd.gridmet(
    lat=fired_evt.centroid_lat,
    lon=fired_evt.centroid_lon,
    start=str(fired_evt.t0.date()),
    end=str(fired_evt.t1.date()),
    variable="tmmx",
)

pipe(clim) | v.extract(fired_event=fired_evt) | v.fire_plot(fired_event=fired_evt)

Publication QA status

!!! warning "Reviewed FIRED preview not yet published" This page no longer embeds a text placeholder disguised as an image. A preview will be restored only after the exact FIRED event, matched climate request, provenance, numerical checks, and exported figure are reviewed together. The Quickstart remains a real-data workflow and does not enable synthetic fallback.

Who collects it and why

FIRED was assembled by Balch, Iglesias, and collaborators to provide a consistent, research-grade record of wildland fire events for studying drivers, impacts, and fire–climate interactions. Its coverage and methodological transparency make it a common reference for fire science in North America.

How CubeDynamics accesses it

FIRED layers are pulled from a CU Scholar ZIP archive, extracted on-the-fly, and cached locally in a user directory. Functions load the requested layer (events or daily perimeters), reproject to EPSG:4326, and return GeoDataFrames ready to intersect with climate cubes. Users can opt into automatic downloads or rely on pre-populated cache files for offline analysis.

Important variables and dimensions

Field	Meaning	Units
id	FIRED event identifier	unitless
date	Observation date for daily perimeters	ISO date
geometry	Polygon footprint in EPSG:4326	degrees
area_ha (if present)	Burned area for the polygon	hectares

Citation

Balch, J. K., Iglesias, V., Braswell, A., Rossi, M. W., Joseph, M. B., Mahood, A., Arkle, R. S., & Boer, M. M. (2020). FIRED: A global fire event database. Scientific Data, 7, 164. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-020-0524-5

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