Shallow Thoughts : tags : fire

How to Use QGIS to Identify Fire Areas

(A QGIS beginner's tutorial.)

For quite a while I've been wanting a map showing the perimeters of the big local fires. When walking through a burned area, I wonder, was this one from the Cerro Grande fire? Or Las Conchas? Or another fire?

Yesterday, inspired by Ryan Peek's #30DayMapChallenge toot on California Fire Perimeters, I decided to look for the data and load it in QGIS.

Also, I never did an entry for Day 3 of the #30DayMapChallenge, "Polygons", so this is it, not quite three weeks late.

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Time-Lapse Video of Pyrocumulus from the Hermit's Peak Fire

The Cerro Pelado fire that was threatening Los Alamos is mostly under control now (71% contained as of Tuesday morning), and the county has relaxed the "prepare to evacuate" status.

That's good, and not just for Los Alamos, because it means more people who can fight the much larger Hermit's Peak/Calf Canyon fire, currently 26% contained and stretching over a huge 299,565 acres.

For those of us on the Pajarito Plateau, that means we're getting views of enormous pyrocumulus clouds towering over the Sangre de Cristo mountains from Las Vegas to just south of Taos.

I keep missing the opportunity for photos, but on Sunday night I took a series of images and made this time-lapse movie.

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Mapping Fire Perimeters

I've been using the Wildland Fires map from MappingSupport.com to keep an eye on the Cerro Pelado fire and the larger (though more distant from me) Hermit's Peak/Calf Canyon fires raging in the Pecos.

It's an excellent map, but it's a little sporadic in whether it shows the fire perimeter. In any case, as a data junkie, I wanted to know how to get the data and make my own display, maybe for a quick viewer that I can pop up when I sign on in the morning.

Also, Los Alamos County, on its Cerro Pelado Information page, has a map showing the "Go" lines (if the fire crosses these lines, we have to evacuate) for Los Alamos and White Rock and I'd like to be able to view those lines on the same map with the fire perimeter and hot spots.

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Earth, Wind and (Cerro Pelado) Fire

It's the windy season, and the winds are crazy here. I'm pretty sure I saw a house, some flying monkeys and a woman on a bicycle fly past the window twenty minutes ago.

I'm not sure precisely how crazy — our weather station is only showing a max of 18 mph, which mostly means there are too many trees around it, but the weather station at TA54 just up the road is reading 26 right now, with a max of 48.3.

The cage that I built this spring to keep the deer away from the apple tree (not that it ever flowers or fruits anyway) keeps wanting to slide into the tree or topple over on top of it. I had to jump up twice during dinner and run out to rescue it. So now it's tied to some big rocks and, if those lose their grip, it's also tied to the fence.

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