Evaluation of a new fire growth measure for research analyses

Using wildland fire data in scientific studies can be a frustrating experience, at best. Daily or multi-day growth data are often all that are available and even this data can be difficult to obtain. Furthermore, the acres burned per day measure of fire growth is almost never normally distributed for any individual fire and multiple fires usually cannot be combined due to varying fuels, terrain, and climate regimes. This presentation will describe a method for computing a measure of fire growth that can be normally distributed and allows for aggregation of multiple fires. Evaluation of the measure using data from the SMARTFIRE system and ICS-209 reports will be presented.