Wildfire
Published July 5, 2019 | Version 3.0.0
Dataset Open

Fire Weather Index - ERA5 HRES

Authors/Creators

  • 1. European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts
  • 2. Joint Research Centre

Description

The Fire Weather Index (FWI) is a numeric rating of fire intensity, dependent on weather conditions. This is a good indicator of fire danger because it contains both a component of fuel availability (drought conditions) and a measure of ease of spread. 

This is part of a larger dataset providing gridded field calculations from the Canadian Fire Weather Index System using weather forcings from the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) ERA5 reanalysis dataset (Hersbach et al., 2019), and replaces the homonymous indices based on ERA-Interim (Vitolo et al., 2019). The dataset has been developed through a collaboration between the Joint Research Centre and ECMWF under the umbrella of the Global Wildfires Information System (GWIS), a joint initiative of the GEO and the Copernicus Work Programs. 

The dataset consists of seven indices, each of which describes a different aspect of the effect that fuel moisture and wind have on fire ignition probability and its behavior, if started. The indices are called: Fine Fuel Moisture Code (FFMC), Duff Moisture Code (DMC), Drought Code (DC), Initial Spread Index (ISI), Build Up Index (BUI), Fire Weather Index (FWI) and Daily Severity Rating (DSR). For convenience, each index is archived separately on Zenodo.  

Data are generated using the open source software GEFF v3.0 (https://git.ecmwf.int/projects/CEMSF/repos/geff), which now uses settings and parameters provided by the JRC (more info here https://git.ecmwf.int/projects/CEMSF/repos/geff/browse/NEWS.md). The caliver R package (Vitolo et al. 2017, 2018) contains useful functions to process this dataset. 

Details: 

  • File format: netcdf4
  • Coordinate system: World Geodetic System 1984 (also known as WGS 1984, EPSG:4326)
  • Longitude range: [-180, +180]
  • Latitude range: [-90, +90]
  • Temporal resolution: 1 day (at 12 local noon)
  • Spatial resolution: 0.28 degrees (~31 Km)
  • Spatial coverage: Global
  • Time span: from 1980-01-01 to 2019-06-30
  • Stream: Deterministic forecasts

Notes

Contract 933710 between JRC and ECMWF (Copernicus - Fire Danger Forecast Computation)

Files

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Additional details

Related works

References
10.1175/JAMC-D-15-0297.1 (DOI)
10.5281/zenodo.582416 (DOI)
10.1371/journal.pone.0189419 (DOI)
10.1038/sdata.2019.32 (DOI)
10.21957/vf291hehd7 (DOI)

Funding

European Commission
ANYWHERE - EnhANcing emergencY management and response to extreme WeatHER and climate Events 700099

References

  • Di Giuseppe, F., Pappenberger, F., Wetterhall, F., Krzeminski, B., Camia, A., Libertá, G. and San Miguel, J., 2016. The potential predictability of fire danger provided by numerical weather prediction. Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, 55(11), pp.2469-2491. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1175/JAMC-D-15-0297.1
  • Hersbach, H., Bell, B., Berrisford, P., Horányi, A., Muñoz Sabater, J., Nicolas, J., Radu, R., Schepers, D., Simmons, A., Soci, C., and Dee, D.: Global reanalysis: goodbye ERA-Interim, hello ERA5, ECMWF Newsletter No. 159, Reading, UK, European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, https://doi.org/10.21957/vf291hehd7, 2019.
  • Vitolo C., Di Giuseppe F., Krzeminski B., San-Miguel-Ayanz J., 2019. A 1980–2018 global fire danger re-analysis dataset for the Canadian Fire Weather Indices, Scientific Data. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2019.32
  • Vitolo C., Di Giuseppe F., D'Andrea M., 2018. Caliver: An R package for CALIbration and VERification of forest fire gridded model outputs. PLoS ONE 13(1): e0189419. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0189419
  • Vitolo C., Di Giuseppe F., D'Andrea M., 2017. caliver R package version 1.0. URL: https://github.com/ecmwf/caliver, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.582416.