CalFire makes publicly available all the material produced during incident responses in (somewhat) real-time via this FTP site.
However given that the target audience is CalFire personnel themselves, it is not hosted nor organized in a way that eases public consumption.
Accordingly, I thought I’d try to explain the general structure to assist others in locating relevant information.
High-level directory structure
At the root level is a folder-per-year, and within that are folders for each major complex:
Within each complex’s folder will be sub-folders for high-level categories of the incident response (this example - and all further examples herein - from the LNU Lightning Complex’s sub-folder):
Each of these sub-folders are organized indepdently, so below I’ll go through some of the more useful in further detail. Whenever the pattern “<Identifier>” is used below, it represents a placeholder for dynamic information of type Identifier.
Operations maps
Although only posted daily, they contain they most high-granularity maps of the fire boundaries as well as useful details on the division names & breaks (used in radio communications).
These are found in within the “GIS/Products/<Date>” sub-directory.
Incident Action Plans
An incredibly rich resource of daily tactical information, they are usually posted twice daily: the initial draft and then a by-hand corrected version later.
Of particular interest to scanner listeners is the assigned radio frequencies listed at the bottom of each assignment list page.
These are found in within the “IAP/<Date>” sub-directory.
National Infrared Operations data
A wealth of post-processed, analyzed data posted daily, it contains maps rendered with infrared heat intensity data captured by the USDA Forest Service NIROPS unit. Includes not just rendered PDF and DOCX but also KMZ data & shape files for import & rendering into mapping software.
These are found in within the “IR/NIROPS/<Date>” sub-directory.
Please do not hesitate to comment on this post with any other useful documents you’ve discovered that have been overlooked here. Thank you!