Forest fires: fire meteorology and danger rating

Endorsed by
DRMKC
Motivation

Danger rating index is an important real time indicator for the fire fighters. It sums up constant (fuels, topography) and variable (weather) factors that affect the initiation, spread and difficulty of control, and subsequent fire damage of wildfires on an area in a single number that can be easily visualised and used for early alerting.

Potential Solutions
Following solutions could be addressing this gap.

Meteorological conditions largely determine the suitable conditions for fire spread at the local level, and are therefore widely used to predict fire danger. Fire activity across the EU Mediterranean countries varies considerably from year to year, suggesting a strong dependence on both meteorological and climate conditions, since no other factors can change in such magnitude. A better understanding of fire , and its sensitivity to changes in meteorological and climate conditions across spatial scales is needed to better forecast fire danger and improve the capacity of civil protection authorities.

Rationale & related CM function(s)

Need for context-specific analyses of the weather/climate influence on future fire regimes
Advance understanding of the role of weather, coupling vegetation responses to it, in particular under extreme conditions (e.g., live fuel moisture content, increased dead material)
Need for new knowledge on how megafires are generated, what their consequences and costs (financial, social and environmental) are and what the required mix of firefighting approaches is.
Develop and test the use of common weather and fire risk platforms for transboundary fires
Provenance
DRKMC gaps explorer: Fire Meteorology and Danger Rating
eu Portfolio of Solutions web site has been initially developed in the scope of DRIVER+ project. Today, the service is managed by AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH., for the benefit of the European Management. PoS is endorsed and supported by the Disaster Competence Network Austria (DCNA) as well as by the STAMINA and TeamAware H2020 projects.