Modification of the Fosberg fire weather index to include drought

2002 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott L. Goodrick
Keyword(s):  
Drought Index ◽  
Wildland Fire ◽  
Fire Weather ◽  
Potential Influence ◽  
Weather Index ◽  
Fire Weather Index ◽  
Area Burned ◽  
Availability Factor ◽  
Simple Tool ◽  
The Impact

The Fosberg fire weather index is a simple tool for evaluating the potential influence of weather on a wildland fire based on temperature, relative humidity and wind speed. A modification to this index that includes the impact of precipitation is proposed. The Keetch-Byram drought index is used to formulate a ‘fuel availability’ factor that modifies the response of the fire weather index. Comparisons between the original and modified indices are made using historical fire data from the Florida Division of Forestry. The addition of the fuel availability factor helps increase the utility of the fire weather index as it offers an improved relationship between the index and area burned.

Fire activity in Portugal and its relationship to weather and the Canadian Fire Weather Index System

2008 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 328 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Carvalho ◽  
M. D. Flannigan ◽  
K. Logan ◽  
A. I. Miranda ◽  
C. Borrego
Keyword(s):  
Forest Fires ◽  
Daily Maximum ◽  
Fire Weather ◽  
Weather Index ◽  
Fire Weather Index ◽  
Area Burned ◽  
System Components ◽  
Baseline Information ◽  
Forward Stepwise ◽  
Maximum Temperatures

The relationships among the weather, the Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI) System components, the monthly area burned, and the number of fire occurrences from 1980 to 2004 were investigated in 11 Portuguese districts that represent respectively 66% and 61% of the total area burned and number of fires in Portugal. A statistical approach was used to estimate the monthly area burned and the monthly number of fires per district, using meteorological variables and FWI System components as predictors. The approach succeeded in explaining from 60.9 to 80.4% of the variance for area burned and between 47.9 and 77.0% of the variance for the number of fires; all regressions were highly significant (P < 0.0001). The monthly mean and the monthly maximum of daily maximum temperatures and the monthly mean and extremes (maximum and 90th percentile) of the daily FWI were selected for all districts, except for Bragança and Porto, in the forward stepwise regression for area burned. For all districts combined, the variance explained was 80.9 and 63.0% for area burned and number of fires, respectively. Our results point to highly significant relationships among forest fires in Portugal and the weather and the Canadian FWI System. The present analysis provides baseline information for predicting the area burned and number of fires under future climate scenarios and the subsequent impacts on air quality.

Improving Forecasts of Biomass Burning Emissions with the Fire Weather Index

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (10) ◽  
pp. 2789-2799 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Di Giuseppe ◽  
Samuel Rémy ◽  
Florian Pappenberger ◽  
Fredrik Wetterhall
Keyword(s):  
Biomass Burning ◽  
Atmospheric Composition ◽  
Fire Weather ◽  
Weather Index ◽  
Fire Weather Index ◽  
Daily Change ◽  
Global Statistics ◽  
In Fire ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Dependent Factor

AbstractIn the absence of a dynamical fire model that could link the emissions to the weather dynamics and the availability of fuel, atmospheric composition models, such as the European Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Services (CAMS), often assume persistence, meaning that constituents produced by the biomass burning process during the first day are assumed constant for the whole length of the forecast integration (5 days for CAMS). While this assumption is simple and practical, it can produce unrealistic predictions of aerosol concentration due to an excessive contribution from biomass burning. This paper introduces a time-dependent factor , which modulates the amount of aerosol emitted from fires during the forecast. The factor is related to the daily change in fire danger conditions and is a function of the fire weather index (FWI). The impact of the new scheme was tested in the atmospheric composition model managed by the CAMS. Experiments from 5 months of daily forecasts in 2015 allowed for both the derivation of global statistics and the analysis of two big fire events in Indonesia and Alaska, with extremely different burning characteristics. The results indicate that time-modulated emissions based on the FWI calculations lead to predictions that are in better agreement with observations.

scholarly journals The Hot-Dry-Windy Index: A New Fire Weather Index

Atmosphere ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (7) ◽  
pp. 279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Srock ◽  
Joseph Charney ◽  
Brian Potter ◽  
Scott Goodrick
Keyword(s):  
Multiple Scales ◽  
Wildland Fire ◽  
Meteorological Data ◽  
Fire Behavior ◽  
Weather Conditions ◽  
Meteorological Variables ◽  
Fire Weather ◽  
Weather Index ◽  
Fire Weather Index ◽  
Complex Interactions

Fire weather indices are commonly used by fire weather forecasters to predict when weather conditions will make a wildland fire difficult to manage. Complex interactions at multiple scales between fire, fuels, topography, and weather make these predictions extremely difficult. We define a new fire weather index called the Hot-Dry-Windy Index (HDW). HDW uses the basic science of how the atmosphere can affect a fire to define the meteorological variables that can be predicted at synoptic-and meso-alpha-scales that govern the potential for the atmosphere to affect a fire. The new index is formulated to account for meteorological conditions both at the Earth’s surface and in a 500-m layer just above the surface. HDW is defined and then compared with the Haines Index (HI) for four historical fires. The Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR) is used to provide the meteorological data for calculating the indices. Our results indicate that HDW can identify days on which synoptic-and meso-alpha-scale weather processes can contribute to especially dangerous fire behavior. HDW is shown to perform better than the HI for each of the four historical fires. Additionally, since HDW is based on the meteorological variables that govern the potential for the atmosphere to affect a fire, it is possible to speculate on why HDW would be more or less effective based on the conditions that prevail in a given fire case. The HI, in contrast, does not have a physical basis, which makes speculation on why it works or does not work difficult because the mechanisms are not clear.

scholarly journals Preceding Fall Drought Conditions and Overwinter Precipitation Effects on Spring Wildland Fire Activity in Canada

Fire ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 24
Author(s):  
Chelene Hanes ◽  
Mike Wotton ◽  
Douglas G. Woolford ◽  
David L. Martell ◽  
Mike Flannigan
Keyword(s):  
Boreal Forests ◽  
Wildland Fire ◽  
Fire Suppression ◽  
Fire Season ◽  
Fire Weather Index ◽  
Area Burned ◽  
Fire Activity ◽  
Drought Conditions ◽  
Carry Over ◽  
The Impact

Spring fire activity has increased in parts of Canada, particularly in the west, prompting fire managers to seek indicators of potential activity before the fire season starts. The overwintering adjustment of the Canadian Fire Weather Index System’s Drought Code (DC) is a method to adjust and carry-over the previous season’s drought conditions into the spring and potentially point to what lies ahead. The occurrence of spring fires is most strongly influenced by moisture in fine fuels. We used a zero-inflated Poisson regression model to examine the impact of the previous end of season Drought Code (DCf) and overwinter precipitation (Pow) while accounting for the day-to-day variation in fine fuel moisture that drives ignition potential. Impacts of DCf and Pow on area burned and fire suppression effectiveness were also explored using linear and logistic regression frameworks. Eight fire management regions across the boreal forests were analyzed using data from 1979 to 2018. For the majority of regions, drier fall conditions resulted in more human-caused spring fires, but not in greater area burned or reduced suppression effectiveness. The influence of Pow was much more variable pointing to the conclusion that Pow alone is not a good indicator of spring drought conditions.

scholarly journals Calibration and evaluation of the Canadian Forest Fire Weather Index (FWI) System for improved wildland fire danger rating in the UK

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (11) ◽  
pp. 6997-7051 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. C. De Jong ◽  
M. J. Wooster ◽  
K. Kitchen ◽  
C. Manley ◽  
R. Gazzard
Keyword(s):  
Wildland Fire ◽  
Fire Severity ◽  
Weather Prediction ◽  
Fire Danger ◽  
Simultaneous Occurrence ◽  
Fire Weather ◽  
Rating Systems ◽  
Weather Index ◽  
Fire Weather Index ◽  
The Uk

Abstract. Wildfires in the United Kingdom (UK) can pose a threat to people, infrastructure and the natural environment (e.g. to the carbon in peat soils), and their simultaneous occurrence within and across UK regions can periodically place considerable stress upon the resources of Fire and Rescue Services. "Fire danger" rating systems (FDRS) attempt to anticipate periods of heightened fire risk, primarily for early-warning purposes. The UK FDRS, termed the Met Office Fire Severity Index (MOFSI) is based on the Fire Weather Index (FWI) component of the Canadian Forest FWI System. MOFSI currently provides operational mapping of landscape fire danger across England and Wales using a simple thresholding of the final FWI component of the Canadian System. Here we explore a climatology of the full set of FWI System components across the entire UK (i.e. extending to Scotland and Northern Ireland), calculated from daily 2 km gridded numerical weather prediction data, supplemented by meteorological station observations. We used this to develop a percentile-based calibration of the FWI System optimised for UK conditions. We find the calibration to be well justified, since for example the values of the "raw" uncalibrated FWI components corresponding to a very "extreme" (99th percentile) fire danger situation can vary by up to an order of magnitude across UK regions. Therefore, simple thresholding of the uncalibrated component values (as is currently applied) may be prone to large errors of omission and commission with respect to identifying periods of significantly elevated fire danger compared to "routine" variability. We evaluate our calibrated approach to UK fire danger rating against records of wildfire occurrence, and find that the Fine Fuel Moisture Code (FFMC), Initial Spread Index (ISI) and final FWI component of the FWI system generally have the greatest predictive skill for landscape fires in Great Britain, with performance varying seasonally and by land cover type. At the height of the most recent severe wildfire period in the UK (2 May 2011), 50 % of all wildfires occurred in areas where the FWI component exceeded the 99th percentile, and for each of the ten most serious wildfire events that occurred in the 2010–2012 period, at least one FWI component per event was found to surpass the 95th percentile. Overall, we demonstrate the significant advantages of using a calibrated, percentile-based approach for classifying UK fire danger, and believe our findings provide useful insights for any future redevelopment of the current operational UK FDRS.

scholarly journals Modelling fire frequency and area burned across phytoclimatic regions in Spain using reanalysis data and the Canadian Fire Weather Index System

2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (5) ◽  
pp. 4891-4924 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Bedia ◽  
S. Herrera ◽  
J. M. Gutiérrez
Keyword(s):  
Fire Regimes ◽  
Fire Frequency ◽  
Reanalysis Data ◽  
Climate Impacts ◽  
Burned Area ◽  
Fire Weather ◽  
Fire Occurrence ◽  
Weather Index ◽  
Fire Weather Index ◽  
Area Burned

Abstract. We develop fire occurrence and burned area models in peninsular Spain, an area of high variability in climate and fuel types, for the period 1990–2008. We based the analysis on a phytoclimatic classification aiming to the stratification of the territory into homogeneous units in terms of climatic and fuel type characteristics, allowing to test model performance under different climatic and fuel conditions. We used generalized linear models (GLM) and multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS) as modelling algorithms and temperature, relative humidity, precipitation and wind speed, taken from the ERA-Interim reanalysis, as well as the components of the Canadian Forest Fire Weather Index (FWI) System as predictors. We also computed the standardized precipitation-evapotranspiration index (SPEI) as an additional predictor for the models of burned area. We found two contrasting fire regimes in terms of area burned and number of fires: one characterized by a bimodal annual pattern, characterizing the Nemoral and Oro-boreal phytoclimatic types, and another one exhibiting an unimodal annual cycle, with the fire season concentrated in the summer months in the Mediterranean and Arid regions. The fire occurrence models attained good skill in most of the phytoclimatic zones considered, yielding in some zones notably high correlation coefficients between the observed and modelled inter–annual fire frequencies. Total area burned also exhibited a high dependence on the meteorological drivers, although their ability to reproduce the observed annual burned area time series was poor in most cases. We identified temperature and some FWI system components as the most important explanatory variables, and also SPEI in some of the burned area models, highlighting the adequacy of the FWI system for fire modelling applications and leaving the door opened to the development a more complex modelling framework based on these predictors. Furthermore, we demonstrate the potential usefulness of ERA-Interim reanalysis data for the reconstruction of historical fire-climate relationships at the scale of analysis. Fire frequency predictions may provide a preferable basis for past fire history reconstruction, long-term monitoring and the assessment of future climate impacts on fire regimes across regions, posing several advantages over burned area as response variable.

scholarly journals Combining fire radiative power observations with the fire weather index improves the estimation of fire emissions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Di Giuseppe ◽  
Samuel Rémy ◽  
Florian Pappenberger ◽  
Fredrik Wetterhall
Keyword(s):  
Biomass Burning ◽  
Atmospheric Composition ◽  
Composition Analysis ◽  
Fire Weather ◽  
Atmospheric Conditions ◽  
Weather Index ◽  
Fire Weather Index ◽  
Fire Emissions ◽  
Radiative Power ◽  
Fire Radiative Power

Abstract. The atmospheric composition analysis and forecast for the European Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Services (CAMS) relies on biomass burning fire emission estimates from the Global Fire Assimilation System (GFAS). GFAS converts fire radiative power (FRP) observations from MODIS satellites into smoke constituents. Missing observations are filled in using persistence where observed FRP from the previous day are progressed in time until a new observation is recorded. One of the consequences of this assumption is an overestimation of fire duration, which in turn translates into an overestimation of emissions from fires. In this study persistence is replaced by modelled predictions using the Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI), which describes how atmospheric conditions affect the vegetation moisture content and ultimately fire duration. The skill in predicting emissions from biomass burning is improved with the new technique, which indicates that using an FWI-based model to infer emissions from FRP is better than persistence when observations are not available.

Fire-Weather Index and Climate Change

2020 ◽  
pp. 45-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zuzana Hubnerova ◽  
Sylvia Esterby ◽  
Steve Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Fire Weather ◽  
Weather Index ◽  
Fire Weather Index

scholarly journals Proposal of an Iot Solution to Fire Risk Assessment Problem

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Bernardo ◽  
Pedro Silva ◽  
Paulo Fazendeiro
Keyword(s):  
Forest Fires ◽  
Fire Risk ◽  
Initial Response ◽  
Fire Weather ◽  
Weather Index ◽  
Fire Weather Index ◽  
Keywords Internet ◽  
The Common ◽  
Civic Awareness ◽  
Municipal Level

Several of the fighting weaknesses evidenced by the forest fires tragedies of the last years are rooted in the disconnection between the current technical/scientific resources and the availability of the resulting information to operational agents on the ground. In order to be effective, a pre-emptive response to similar disasters must include the articulation between local authorities at municipal level - in prevention, preparedness and initial response - and the common citizen who is on the field, resides there, and has a deeper knowledge about the field of operation. This work intends to take a first step in the development of a tool that can serve to improve the civic awareness of all and to support the decision-making of the competent authorities. Keywords: Internet of things, Citizen science, Fire weather index

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