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Every layer, every year

All 21 properties, all 41 water years, all 28 individual layers - every one openable in your browser in a couple of seconds. No download, no account, no software. Each link streams the Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF directly into a map viewer with the right no-data value and a sensible colour stretch already applied.

2025

Sets the year for every link below. Disturbance covers 1986–2024 only; the three topographic bands of the fire landscape are static and carry no year.

Reading what you see

Values are stored as scaled integers. The viewer shows the raw stored number, not the physical quantity. Cover fractions are ×10,000, so 6,500 means 65% cover. Flame length is metres ×100. Biomass is tonnes per hectare. Canopy height comes in two incompatible forms - Veg_CanopyHt is an areal mean in centimetres, the Fire_LCP CH band is a stand height in decimetres, and they differ by 2–6× on the same ground. Each card below states its own units. Full conventions are in The Data and the documentation PDF.

No-data is −9999 for most layers, but 0 for all seven fire layers — the eight Fire_LCP bands by FARSITE convention, and flame length, rate of spread and burn probability because masked ground in those is stored as zero rather than as a fill value. The links above set the right value per layer, so ocean and masked ground render blank rather than as data.

One consequence worth knowing on the three fire-behaviour layers: genuinely non-burnable ground inside the wildland mask is stored as 0 as well, so it renders blank too. Blank there means “nothing would burn” as often as it means “no data” — the two cannot be told apart from the raster alone.

The colour stretches are chosen to show structure across California as a whole, not to be optimal for any one place. Once the viewer is open you can change the stretch, the colour map and the basemap; the whole view lives in the URL, so any view you arrive at is shareable.

How good is each layer? That question has its own answer - see Benchmarking, which reports what each layer was tested against and where it is weaker than the alternatives.