This animation of the Camp Fire is one of the tools that NCAR scientist Janice Coen and her colleagues will use to study the factors that made the wildfire so deadly. A wildfire weather expert, Coen used the CAWFE™ modeling system (derived from Coupled Atmosphere-Wildland Fire Environment) to create this weather-fire simulation of the first eight hours of the Camp Fire. The arrows show near-surface wind vectors and are colored according to the wind speed. This animation is a preliminary result of research she will be conducting into the mechanisms generating strong, highly localized winds and the fires and fire behavior that result.

Note: As a preliminary step in ongoing research, this animation does not show the entirety of the wildfire event nor the many communities that were affected.