FEMA produced this interesting map that plots the number of wildfires, by county, that were 300 acres or larger between 1994 and 2013.
What do you think? Any surprises?
(UPDATE, May 3, 2017: We have a different map of fire activity derived from satellite data, not reports submitted by fire departments.)
I believe the map more accurately displays those states that do not have a strong reporting culture.
I hope this would be normalized by area, but the legend doesn’t indicate this is the case. The bins are also not very informative; 100-1,308-good grief! From the perspective of a geography nerd this is pretty weak sauce. Any chance of a direct link to the source? It would be interesting to know if this data is publicly available data.
Hard to imagine such a large area of Texas having no fires at all for ten years.
Oh they had them. I know guys that were on them in the Big drought years. The difference is reporting. For instance I know for a fact there were large fires in a lot of those KS counties that are white. However fires burn thousands of acres in an afternoon then typically the sun goes down, the wind dies and humidity recovers, and the fire goes out. They don’t make it on anything but the local news.