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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08893 |
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| _version_ | 1866915612842786816 |
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| author | Uhl, Johannes H. Cook, Maxwell C. Amaral, Cibele Leyk, Stefan Balch, Jennifer K. Robock, Alan Toon, Owen B. |
| author_facet | Uhl, Johannes H. Cook, Maxwell C. Amaral, Cibele Leyk, Stefan Balch, Jennifer K. Robock, Alan Toon, Owen B. |
| contents | The increasing occurrence of natural hazards such as wildfires and drought, along with urban expansion and land consumption, causes increasing levels of fire risk to populations and human settlements. Moreover, increasing geopolitical instability in many regions of the world requires evaluation of scenarios related to potential hazards caused by military operations. Quantitative knowledge on burnable fuels and their spatio-temporal distribution across landscapes is crucial for risk and potential damage assessments. While there is good understanding of the distributions of biomass fuels based on remote sensing observations, the combustible mass of the built environment has rarely been quantified in a spatially explicit manner. Therefore, we developed fine-grained estimates of urban fuels for the conterminous United States, estimating the combustible mass of building materials, building contents, and personal vehicles at 250 m spatial resolution. The resulting dataset is called COMBUST (Combustible mass of the built environment in the conterminous United States) and includes different backcasting scenarios from 1975 to 2020. COMBUST is based on the integration of a variety of geospatial data sources such as Earth-observation derived data, real estate data, statistical estimates and volunteered geographic information. COMBUST is accompanied by COMBUST PLUS, a set of consistently enumerated gridded datasets facilitating combustion exposure modelling of buildings and population. These datasets constitute a rich resource for ecological and social science applications, as well as for disaster risk management and planning-related decision making for U.S. settlements. COMBUST is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15611963. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_08893 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | COMBUST: Gridded combustible mass estimates of the built environment in the conterminous United States (1975-2020) Uhl, Johannes H. Cook, Maxwell C. Amaral, Cibele Leyk, Stefan Balch, Jennifer K. Robock, Alan Toon, Owen B. Physics and Society The increasing occurrence of natural hazards such as wildfires and drought, along with urban expansion and land consumption, causes increasing levels of fire risk to populations and human settlements. Moreover, increasing geopolitical instability in many regions of the world requires evaluation of scenarios related to potential hazards caused by military operations. Quantitative knowledge on burnable fuels and their spatio-temporal distribution across landscapes is crucial for risk and potential damage assessments. While there is good understanding of the distributions of biomass fuels based on remote sensing observations, the combustible mass of the built environment has rarely been quantified in a spatially explicit manner. Therefore, we developed fine-grained estimates of urban fuels for the conterminous United States, estimating the combustible mass of building materials, building contents, and personal vehicles at 250 m spatial resolution. The resulting dataset is called COMBUST (Combustible mass of the built environment in the conterminous United States) and includes different backcasting scenarios from 1975 to 2020. COMBUST is based on the integration of a variety of geospatial data sources such as Earth-observation derived data, real estate data, statistical estimates and volunteered geographic information. COMBUST is accompanied by COMBUST PLUS, a set of consistently enumerated gridded datasets facilitating combustion exposure modelling of buildings and population. These datasets constitute a rich resource for ecological and social science applications, as well as for disaster risk management and planning-related decision making for U.S. settlements. COMBUST is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15611963. |
| title | COMBUST: Gridded combustible mass estimates of the built environment in the conterminous United States (1975-2020) |
| topic | Physics and Society |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08893 |