A field dataset from replicated prescribed fire experiments on wildland fire behaviour and fire–atmosphere interactions

Abstract. We present a spatially and temporally resolved dataset characterizing combustion dynamics, fire behaviour, and associated environmental variables from thirty-five replicated prescribed fire experiments conducted between March 2018 and May 2019 on 10 m × 10 m burn plots at the U.S. Forest Service Silas Little Experimental Forest in the New Jersey Pinelands, USA. The experiments were designed to quantify the physical processes driving combustion, flame propagation, and energy exchange, bridging the gap between small-scale laboratory studies and large-scale prescribed fires. The dataset provides synchronized, multi-instrument observations of high frequency three-dimensional wind, temperature, pressure, fire radiative power, gas concentrations, fuel moisture, and mass loss, along with pre- and post-burn terrestrial LiDAR scans of fuel structure. These data capture key interactions among fuels, atmosphere, and combustion processes at a scale relevant to wildland fire behaviour. The dataset supports development and validation of coupled fire–atmosphere and combustion models, as well as analyses of radiative energy transfer and fuel consumption dynamics. All data are publicly available through the U.S. Forest Service Research Data Archive as an open-access benchmark resource for advancing process-level understanding and model evaluation in wildland fire science.