Publication Date

2-1-2022

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

International Journal of Wildland Fire

Volume

31

Issue

2

DOI

10.1071/WF21106

First Page

149

Last Page

162

Abstract

Due to climate change and associated longer and more frequent droughts, the risk of forest fires increases. To address this, the Institute of Meteorology and Water Management implemented a system for forecasting fire weather in Poland. The Fire Weather Index (FWI) system, developed in Canada, has been adapted to work with meteorological fields derived from the high-resolution (2.5 km) Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. Forecasts are made with 24- and 48-h lead times. The purpose of this work is to present the validation of the implemented system. First, the results of the WRF model were validated using in situ observations from ∼70 synoptic stations. Second, we used the correlation method and Eastaugh's percentile analysis to assess the quality of the FWI index. The data covered the 2019 fire season and were analysed for the whole forest area in Poland. Based on the presented results, it can be concluded that the FWI index (calculated based on the WRF model) has a very high predictive ability of fire risk. However, the results vary by region, distance from human habitats, and size of fire.

Keywords

fire danger, fire weather index, forecasting, forest fires, FWI, Poland, Weather Research and Forecasting Model, WRF

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Department

Meteorology and Climate Science

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