During November 2018, the Camp Fire burned more than 150,000 acres in Butte County, California. The fire was the deadliest and most destructive in California history, destroying more than 18,000 structures and causing at least 85 fatalities. The U.S. Geological Survey sampled surface water in areas affected by the Camp Fire, plus an unburned control site, during two post-fire sampling events, January 21-23, 2019 and February 28 - March 1, 2019. During each of those two sampling events, surface-water samples were collected at 8 stream locations. These 16 water samples were filtered using filters with multiple pore sizes (1.2 µm, 0.8 µm, 0.45 µm, and 0.22 µm) to evaluate colloid transport of trace elements. The filtrates were analyzed for 50 major and trace elements by Inductively Coupled Plasma methods. The 0.45 µm filtrates from the January 2019 sampling event were analyzed for 87Sr/86Sr. Field measurements are reported of water temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, and turbidity. Data are also reported for the concentration of suspended sediment and the percent of suspended sediment less than 0.0625 mm in diameter in each water sample. During January 21-23, 2019 the USGS team collected streambed sediment at the same 8 locations where water samples were collected. Eleven other samples of fire-affected soils or streambed sediments were collected by USGS during December 2018, January 2019, and March 2019; these sites included soils in close proximity to burned vehicles and structures. Collaborators at California State University, Chico collected water samples at selected stream sites between November 30, 2018 and January 17, 2019 and provided unfiltered split samples to USGS. The USGS recovered suspended particulate solids from these water samples; sufficient particulate material for chemical analysis was recovered from eight of these water samples. The streambed sediments, suspended sediments, and soils were analyzed for 51 major and trace elements by Inductively Coupled Plasma methods and for 87Sr/86Sr.

The Camp Fire ignited on November 8, 2018 in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in Butte County, California. The first 24 hours were characterized by a fast-moving fire with initial spread driven by high winds up to 22 m/s (50 mi/h) and long-range spotting up to 6.3 km (3.9 mi) into the community. The fire quickly impacted the communities of Concow, Paradise, and Magalia. The Camp Fire became the most destructive and deadly fire in California history, with over 18000 destroyed structures, 700 damaged structures, and 85 fatalities. After a preliminary reconnaissance, it was determined that abundant data was available to support an in-depth case study of this devastating wildland-urban interface (WUI) fire to increase our understanding of WUI fire spread, fire behavior, evacuation, and structure response.Over 2200 fire observation data points were documented, each assigned a geographic location and timestamp. Through extensive cross-referencing and quality control to reconcile inconsistencies, the data points were integrated to compile a timeline of the fire spread. Data attributes include the observation description, time, location, type of fire (i.e., a spot fire, vegetative, structural, or other type of fire), and information source.

This Data Release summarizes measurements of hydraulic and physical properties of soils and ash at sites in the area impacted by the 2017 Thomas Fire, USA. Physical properties include dry bulk density, loss on ignition, and saturated soil water content. Hydraulic properties include field-saturated hydraulic conductivity, sorptivity, Green-Ampt wetting front potential, and soil water retention. These measurements provide a foundation to reduce uncertainty of parameters in hydrologic models used to predict water-related hazards, water quality, and water quantity. Note that all methods of data acquisition and processing, column headings, and data annotations are explained in the metadata files.

This Data Release summarizes measurements of hydraulic and physical properties of soils and ash at sites in the area impacted by the 2017 Thomas Fire, USA. Physical properties include dry bulk density, loss on ignition, and saturated soil water content. Hydraulic properties include field-saturated hydraulic conductivity, sorptivity, Green-Ampt wetting front potential, and soil water retention. These measurements provide a foundation to reduce uncertainty of parameters in hydrologic models used to predict water-related hazards, water quality, and water quantity. Note that all methods of data acquisition and processing, column headings, and data annotations are explained in the metadata files.

This dataset represents percent area burned in each burn severity class for wildfires within individual local and accumulated upstream catchments for NHDPlusV2 Waterbodies for each year for 1984-2018.The Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity MTBS project assesses the frequency, extent, and magnitude (size and severity) of all large wildland fires (includes wildfire, wildland fire use, and prescribed fire) in the conterminous United States (CONUS), Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico from the beginning of the Landsat Thematic Mapper archive to the present. See: https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/monitoring-trends-in-burn-severity-burned-area-boundaries-feature-layer-27201 and https://www.mtbs.gov/product-descriptions

This dataset represents percent area burned in each burn severity class for wildfires within individual local and accumulated upstream catchments for NHDPlusV2 Waterbodies for each year for 1984-2018.The Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity MTBS project assesses the frequency, extent, and magnitude (size and severity) of all large wildland fires (includes wildfire, wildland fire use, and prescribed fire) in the conterminous United States (CONUS), Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico from the beginning of the Landsat Thematic Mapper archive to the present. See: https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/monitoring-trends-in-burn-severity-burned-area-boundaries-feature-layer-27201 and https://www.mtbs.gov/product-descriptions

During the spring and early summer of 2012, approximately 1,200 square kilometers of Gila National Forest in southwestern New Mexico, including the upper portions of the Whitewater Creek watershed, were burned by the Whitewater-Baldy Complex Fire. The following September 12-17, 2013, a near-record, one-week long storm event produced widespread, historic rainfall amounts throughout the southwest U.S. in four distinct pulses. Data published here include GIS shapefiles of documented erosional features associated with the September 2013 storms and associated rainfall data. Data files are numbered 1-9. Shapefiles provided in this data release include: 1) polygon of the study area; 2) point locations of 688 debris-flow initiations; 3) polyline shapefiles of 310 debris-flow channels within the Whitewater Creek watershed; 4) polygon shapefiles of areas experiencing erosion by rilling; 5) polyline shapefiles of field-surveyed features including 3 debris flows and 2 rill-area transects; and 6) point shapefile of debris-flow cross-sectional survey locations. Tabulated data provided in this data release include: 7) debris-flow channel cross-sectional survey data; 8) topographic transect data for areas experiencing erosion by rilling; and 9) rainfall data for the period beginning 00:00 2013-09-12 through 23:51 MST of 2013-09-17 for USGS rain gages 09442980 - Mineral Creek Near Glenwood, NM and 09443800 - Whitewater Creek at Catwalk NRT, Near Glenwood, NM.

The California desert occupies the southeastern 27% of California (11,028,300 ha, 110,283 km2 or 27,251,610 ac). It includes two ecoregional provinces comprised of five desert regions (“ecological sections”; Miles and Goudy 1997). The American Semi-Desert and Desert Province (warm deserts) includes the Mojave Desert, Sonoran Desert, and Colorado Desert sections in the southern 83% of the California desert. The Intermountain Semi-Desert Province (cold deserts) includes the Southeastern Great Basin and Mono sections in the northern 17% of the region. Previous analyses of fire patterns across the California desert have used point occurrence data. Point occurrence data can have limitations because they can: (1) represent the containment area rather than actual fire area; (2) extend to include unburned areas as contiguous within the fire boundary; (3) be incomplete and estimated before the end of burning; and (4) be reported only in public agency boundaries. Point data also often contain errors associated with the initial recording, or subsequent transcription from paper to electronic records, of the point of origin of a fire. Point datasets also can contain redundancies, such as the same fire being reported by multiple responding agencies that can affect derived statistics such as fire area. Additionally, because points are one dimensional, the area they conceptually represent cannot be readily parsed using other spatial data (e.g. by desert regions and/or ecological zones). More accurate, detailed, and spatially-explicit fire data are available using Landsat satellite imagery from the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) program. We used these data to precisely document fire area (area within fire perimeters) for fires ≥405 ha (1,000 ac) between 1984 and 2013 in the California desert (www.mtbs.gov; accessed 6/30/2015). Previous fire analyses have also stratified analyses by ecological zones derived from 4 Küchler potential vegetation types (barren, desert shrub, juniper-pinyon, sagebrush). That approach does not distinguish how the relative proportions of vegetation types comprising each ecological zone varies among California desert regions, or explain how the ecotones between the zones shift upslope with decreasing latitude moving from the cold deserts in the north to the warm deserts in the south. These limitations hinder their application to specific areas within the desert bioregion. We derived ecological zones derived from 43 LANDFIRE vegetation biophysical setting types, plus various non-wildland (e.g. developed urban/agriculture/roads) and non-burnable (e.g. open water/barren) areas (Rollins 2009). We also omitted from analyses non-wildland and non-burnable areas (2,003,148 ha [4,949,887 ac]), and focused instead on the remaining burnable wildland areas (9,025,152 ha [22,301,636 ac]). The 43 biophysical setting types were grouped into 13 general vegetation types, which were further grouped into four elevation-based ecological zones plus one riparian zone according to their constituent plant associations. The resulting 5 ecological zones were then intersected with the boundaries of the 5 desert regions of the California to create a map and associated burnable wildland area statistics. A diagram was also created illustrating the relative elevational positions of each ecological zone and vegetation type along a latitudinal gradient from cold deserts to warm deserts. These data were developed to assess the distribution of wildfire regimes across California deserts for the chapter "Southeast Deserts Bioregion" in the book "Fire in California's Ecosystems, Second Edition" published by University of California Press. Miles, S. R. and C. B. Goudy. 1997. Ecological subregions of California: section and subsection descriptions. USDA Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Region, R5-EM-TP-005, San Francisco, CA. Rollins Matthew G. (2009) LANDFIRE: a nationally consistent vegetation, wildland fire, and fuel assessment. International

This data release includes time-series data from a monitoring site located in a small drainage basin in the Arroyo Seco watershed in Los Angeles County, CA, USA (N3788964 E389956, UTM Zone 11, NAD83). The site was established after the 2009 Station Fire and recorded a series debris flows in the first winter after the fire. The data include three types of time-series: (1) 1-minute time series of rainfall, soil water content, channel bed pore pressure and temperature, and flow stage recorded by radar and laser distance meters (ArroyoSecoContinuous.csv); (2) 10-Hz time series of flow stage recorded by the laser distance meter during rain storms (ArroyoSecoStormLaser.csv), and (3) 2-second time series of rainfall and channel bed pore pressure and temperature during rain storms (ArroyoSecoStormPressureRain.csv). The laser and radar distance meters are suspended above the pore pressure sensor mounted in the bedrock of the channel. The equations for converting the distance measurements into flow stage above the pressure sensor (or stage of the stationary bed surface during times of no flow) are given by the equations Stage_laser (meters) = 2.107 meters – Distance_laser (meters), and Stage_radar (meters) = 2.156 meters – Distance_radar (feet)*0.3048 Details of this study are described in the journal article: Kean, J. W., D. M. Staley, and S. H. Cannon (2011), In situ measurements of post-fire debris flows in southern California: Comparisons of the timing and magnitude of 24 debris-flow events with rainfall and soil moisture conditions, J. Geophys. Res., 116, F04019, doi:10.1029/2011JF002005.

This data release includes time-series data from a monitoring site located in a small (0.12 km2) drainage basin in the Las Lomas watershed in Los Angeles County, CA, USA. The site was established after the 2016 Fish Fire and recorded a series debris flows in the first winter after the fire. The station is located along the channel at the outlet of the study area (34 9’18.50”N, 117 56’41.33”W, WGS84). The data were collected between November 15, 2016 and February 23, 2017. The data include two types of time series: (1) continuous 1-minute time series of rainfall and flow stage recorded by a laser distance meter suspended over the channel (LasLomasContinuous.csv), and (2) 50-Hz time series of flow stage and flow-induced ground vibrations recorded by two geophones (LasLomasStorm.csv). The continuous file contains brief data gaps when the station was serviced, at which time the record of cumulative rainfall was reset to zero. The ground vibrations were measured by two 4.5 Hz vertical axis geophones (Geospace SNG 11D/PC902/OPEN-30m) located approximately 2 m from the channel bank. One geophone was located 6.4 m upstream from the laser distance meter. The second geophone was located 7.6 m downstream of the geophone. The geophone data is recorded in millivolts and the geophone constant is 32 Volts/(m/s). The equation for converting the laser distance measurements into flow stage above the bedrock in the channel is: Stage_laser (meters) = 4.320 meters – Distance_laser (millimeters) /1000. Time stamps are in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Details of this study are described in the journal article: Tang, H., McGuire, L.A., F.K. Rengers, Kean, J. W., Staley, D.M., and Smith, J.B. (2018), Evolution of debris flow initation mechanisms and sediment sources during a series of post-wildfire rainstorms, J. Geophys. Res., xxx, FYYYYY, doi:10.1029/2018JF004837.