Summary

Assessing the Burn severity of the Caribou fire and adjusting the BARC more accurately reflect on the ground condition.

Description

Step 1: We received two Tiff images that had been ordered from the region. One of these was a BARC256, but was missing part of the data for the west edge of the fire. 
The other was a complete, merged BARC4 image, classed according to the original class breaks provided from GTAC for the entire fire area (from now on referred to ‘West Edge BARC4’).

Step 2: Modify the original, but incomplete BARC 256 according to field observations:

	Original Class breaks provided from GTAC:
		Unburned: 0-67
		Low: 68-102
		Moderate: 103-195
		High: 196-255


	Modified class breaks field verified used for SBS:
		Unburned: 0-55
		Low: 56-229
		Moderate: 230-248
		High: 249-255


Step 3: The BARC256 had several large areas of high reflectance with pixel values of 255. These values were not truly high burn severity in the field. A new field was created and 
	pixel values were copied over. All 255 value pixels were reassigned a value in the moderate range. 


Step 4: the BARC256 was reclassified into a new BARC4Step 5: We created a mask polygon to extract the West Edge BARC4 image. We altered the classes as follows:Unburned was left 
	unchanged (no change to gridcode1)Low was expanded to include to include the moderate (gridcode 2 and 3 were combined into gridcode 2)High was converted to moderate 
	(gridcode 4 became gridcode 3)Step 6: the two new, altered BARC4 images were merged, converted to shapefiles, and clipped to the fire perimeter. 


Credits

Megan McGinnis
Jori Johnson

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