Round Fire (2015): mapping the 7,000-acre footprint

The archived outline of the Round Fire spans about 7.3 km from west to east and 8.4 km from south to north. CAL FIRE places the incident at Westside of Highway 395 at the Sherwin Grade. The mapped boundary provides a second way to locate the event: it shows the extent around that reference location.

Start listed by CAL FIRE6 February 2015
County listingInyo, Mono
Reported area in hectares2,833 ha (converted from acres)
Extent of the mapped outline7.3 × 8.4 km (west–east × south–north)
Containment entry in the archive12 February 2015
Round Fire historical perimeter; north up. Approximate spans 7.3 by 8.4 kilometres.
Generalized historical perimeter. Source: NIFC interagency fire perimeter history.

What the perimeter shows

The two spans differ by only 1.1 km. That does not make this a circular burn: the dimensions measure the outermost coordinates, leaving indentations and gaps invisible. Use the polygon itself, rather than its enclosing rectangle, to check whether a location intersects the footprint.

Two estimates of area

The incident report gives 7,000 acres; the interagency feature stores 6,537.5 GIS acres. The mapped value is 462.5 acres below the reported value (6.61%). This compares two published measurements, not two observation times. The difference cannot be read as fire growth.

CAL FIRE also records structures damaged: 5; structures destroyed: 43. Those counts come from the incident record. A building inside the perimeter cannot be assigned a damage category from this map alone.

A similar-sized fire for comparison

The South Fork Fire of 2017 is the closest match by reported acreage in this 100-case collection (7,000 acres). Its mapped spans are 9.9 by 8.3 km, west–east then south–north, versus 7.3 by 8.4 km here. The longer axes run in different directions. Matching on acreage would miss that contrast.

Sources and map method

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.