Wildfires and Drought, 2000-2018
This map illustrates the effect of drought on the occurance and severity of wildfires from 2000-2018.

How to use:

Select a year from the dropdown menu to cycle through data for that year.
Use the slider or direction arrows to toggle between each month for the year selected.
The indicator text will show the month and year selected in YYYY-MM format.
A layer control widget is located in the upper-right corner of the map. You can toggle the basemap between aerial imagery, topographic, and dark gray, and also select which operational layers will be displayed on the map including fires, drought, and places for reference.

About the Data:

Fire data shown in the map is from the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) program for the years 2000-2018. It includes fires 1000 acres or greater in the western United States and 500 acres or greater in the eastern United States. To view more information about the data and how it was derived, please visit MTBS.gov

Drought Data was acquired from the United States Drought Monitor (USDM) program for the years 2000-2018. A new USDM dataset is updated weekly and contains area designations of: Abnormally Dry (D0), Moderate Drought (D1), Severe Drought (D2), Extreme Drought (D3), Exceptional Drought (D4). A more in-depth description of the dataset can be found at Drought.gov.

Limitations:

This mapping application is meant to provide further insight into the relationship of wildfire and drought conditions. Wildfire and drought conditions are complex phenomena resulting from many natural processes and factors not captured in this analysis. Additionally, due to the many Federal, State, and Local agencies responding to fires across all states, there is no complete record of wildfires. Because the MTBS dataset focuses on large fires, there are many fire locations not represented.
The USDM data is published weekly. To simplify our analysis, we selected the first week of each month to represent the drought conditions for the entire month and grouped the fire start date by month. This method could lead to inaccurate reporting regarding the colocations of fire and drought depending on the fire start date and the area's drought index during that specific time period.

Data Sources:

-Wildfire data from: Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity
-Drought data from: National Integrated Drought Information System
-Arrow icon by Alice Design from the Noun Project,
-Info icon by Joe Pictos from the Noun Project
-Forest fire icon from freesvg.org

Studying the Effect of Drought on Wildfires in the United States