Rapid remote sensing assessment of landscape-scale impacts from the California Camp Fire

The Camp Fire rapidly spread across a landscape in Butte County, California, toward the city of Paradise in the early morning hours of 8 November 2018. Here we provide a set of initial tools and analyses that are useful to a variety of stakeholders, including: (1) a visualization app for GOES 16 data and the surrounding landscape showing the rapid spread of the fire from 6:37-10:47 a.m. local time; (2) processed Landsat 8 images for before, during, and after the fire, along with a tool for visualizing regional impacts; (3) a timeline of fire spread from ignition over the first four hours; and (4) a description of a potential early warning app that could make use of existing data, visualization, and analysis tools, to provide additional information for effective evacuation of communities threatened by rapidly moving wildfires. Using these tools we estimate that, over the first hour, the Camp Fire was consuming ~200 ha/minute of vegetation with a linear spread rate of 14 km over the fire’s first 25 minutes, or ~33km/hr. We briefly discuss broader use of remote sensing and geospatial analysis for fire research and risk management.