Fuel Layer
What fuels a surface fire — the Scott & Burgan FM40 fuel-model class, assigned deterministically from land cover × climate (grass, shrub, timber-litter, timber-understory, non-burnable). Feeds the Petrel Wildfire Hazard (Cell2Fire) and works standalone for fuels mapping. v1.0 replaces the earlier CC-BY-NC ML fuel line — a single-class, commercial-clean crosswalk under CC-BY-4.0.
What ships in the bundle
1 global ~270 m (9 arc-second) GeoTIFFs (~322 MB total) plus the full documentation set. All files are Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs with internal tiling and overviews — fast for both bulk download and windowed reads.
Method
Inputs · ESA WorldCover 2021 land cover, Beck Köppen-Geiger climate — both permissive, so the derived Layer is CC-BY-4.0 (commercial use permitted)
Training labels · —
Method · Deterministic FM40 crosswalk: land cover × Köppen climate → Scott & Burgan fuel-model class
Documentation
- README — entry point + quick start
- Methodology — how the model was built
- Model card — intended use, biases, limitations
- Data sources — input data citations
- Validation report — accuracy + known limitations
- Changelog — vintage evolution
- Citation — how to cite this dataset
- API usage — code snippets
Download
Free for any use, including commercial, with attribution. Account required.
# $PETREL_API_KEY = your API key (tlk.…) from the dashboard — free tier works.
# 1. Fetch 1-hour signed URLs for every file in the bundle:
curl -s -H "X-API-Key: $PETREL_API_KEY" \
https://api.petreldata.io/v1/layer/fuel/v1.0/bundle > bundle.json
# 2. Download the full layer (~322 MB):
mkdir -p fuel_v1.0
jq -r '.files[] | [.url, .name] | @tsv' bundle.json | \
while IFS=$'\t' read -r url name; do
curl -s "$url" -o "fuel_v1.0/$name"
doneLicense & citation
License: CC-BY-4.0. Free for any use, including commercial, with attribution.
Citation:
Petrel (2026). Petrel Fuel Layer v1.0.
https://petreldata.io/layers/fuel
CC-BY-4.0Version history
- Initial release. A global Scott & Burgan FM40 surface fuel-model class raster at native ~270 m (9 arcsec), assigned deterministically from ESA WorldCover 2021 land cover × Beck Köppen-Geiger climate: land cover sets the fuel family (non-burnable / grass / grass-shrub / shrub / timber-understory / timber-litter) and climate refines it (e.g. Mediterranean shrub → SH5, tropical forest → TL9, boreal forest → TU5). Feeds the surface-fuel grid of the Petrel Wildfire Hazard (Cell2Fire), and works standalone for fuels mapping and fire-behavior work.
- Free and commercial-clean (CC-BY-4.0). This is the whole point of v1.0: it derives only from CC-BY-4.0 sources — no Meta canopy (CC-BY-NC), no LANDFIRE, no share-alike inputs — so it is fully commercially redistributable with attribution. It replaces the earlier CC-BY-NC ML fuel line (fuel_v0.1/v0.2_global_ml) as the free fuel layer.
- Globally consistent by construction. The crosswalk applies the same rules everywhere, fixing the US-trained ML line's abroad errors — Mediterranean shrub read as grass, tropical/boreal forest families confused, and open water read as grass are all corrected.
- Class only in v1.0. Ships the FM40 class raster; the four canopy attributes (cover, stand height, canopy base height, bulk density) are a documented v1.1 item (real per-pixel values from the CC-BY ETH global canopy-height layer). Validation is biome plausibility plus US LANDFIRE family agreement — not a per-pixel accuracy score.