The archived outline of the Rey Fire spans about 25.3 km from west to east and 9.4 km from south to north. CAL FIRE places the incident at off of Hwy 154 and Paradise Rd, north of Santa Barbara. The mapped boundary provides a second way to locate the event: it shows the extent around that reference location.
| Start listed by CAL FIRE | 18 August 2016 |
|---|---|
| County listing | Santa Barbara |
| Reported area in hectares | 13,195 ha (converted from acres) |
| Extent of the mapped outline | 25.3 × 9.4 km (west–east × south–north) |
| Containment entry in the archive | 15 September 2016 |
What the perimeter shows
The longer dimension runs east–west and is about 2.7 times the shorter one. A circular buffer drawn around the incident point would hide that difference. A road or settlement at the same distance from the point could fall inside or outside the mapped footprint depending on its direction.
Two estimates of area
The incident report gives 32,606 acres; the interagency feature stores 32,580.4 GIS acres. The mapped value is 25.6 acres below the reported value (0.08%). This compares two published measurements, not two observation times. The difference cannot be read as fire growth.
A similar-sized fire for comparison
The Beaver Fire of 2014 is the closest match by reported acreage in this 100-case collection (32,496 acres). Its mapped spans are 20.2 by 13.7 km, west–east then south–north, versus 25.3 by 9.4 km here. Both outlines are longer in the same direction, but one is substantially narrower relative to its length.
Sources and map method
- Rey Fire · CAL FIRE incident record
- NIFC interagency history · source perimeter (GeoJSON)
- Beaver Fire · comparison incident
- Comparison perimeter · interagency record
Spans use the geographic extremes of a generalized boundary, converted to kilometres at its middle latitude. They are approximate map dimensions, not distances travelled by flames. The GIS acreage is the source attribute, not an area recalculated from the simplified outline.