Global Fire Weather Indices - with default and overwintered DC startup

This dataset was developed by Natural Resources Canada using the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) ERA5-HRS Reanalysis product (C3S, 2017) as inputs to the Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System R Package (Wang et al. 2017). The dataset provides gridded values of the Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI) System indices of fuel moisture and fire behaviour, including the 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). Each of these indices are produced using two calculation methods applied at the beginning of fire season start-up. The first method used the default DC value (DC=15) to start-up the FWI System calculation and only accounted for the longest stretch of active fire season each year (as determined by Wotton and Flannigan, 1993). The second method used the overwintered DC value, calculated from the DC value of the last day of the previous fire season and a percentage of overwinter precipitation, and accounted for all periods of fire season throughout the year. We recommend users of this data use indices where DC has been overwintered in regions where the fire season shuts off for winter and where low overwinter precipitation occurs (eg. parts of western Canada, the western US and the Siberian Boreal forest).

The FWI System indices calculated using both procedures (i.e. default and overwintered start-up values of the DC) can be downloaded from Zenodo as annual NetCDF files of daily values using the following links:

FFMC using default DC start-up
https://zenodo.org/record/3540950 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3540950)

DMC using default DC start-up
https://zenodo.org/record/3540954 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3540954)

DC using default DC start-up
https://zenodo.org/record/3540959 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3540959)

ISI using default DC start-up
https://zenodo.org/record/3540946 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3540946)

BUI using default DC start-up
https://zenodo.org/record/3540942 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3540942)

FWI using default DC start-up
https://zenodo.org/record/3540938 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3540938)

DSR using default DC start-up
https://zenodo.org/record/3540962 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3540962)

FFMC using overwintered DC start-up
https://zenodo.org/record/3540922 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3540922)

DMC using overwintered DC start-up
https://zenodo.org/record/3540924 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3540924)

DC using overwintered DC start-up
https://zenodo.org/record/3540926 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3540926)

ISI using overwintered DC start-up
https://zenodo.org/record/3540920 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3540920)

BUI using overwintered DC start-up
https://zenodo.org/record/3540918 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3540918)

FWI using overwintered DC start-up
https://zenodo.org/record/3539654 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3539654)

DSR using overwintered DC start-up
https://zenodo.org/record/3540928 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3540928)

Global_FWI_metadata.xml contains ISO compliant meta data relating to these datasets.

fwi_download.py is a python file to facilitate automatic downloading of the data from this repository.

References:

Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) (2017): ERA5: Fifth generation of ECMWF atmospheric reanalyses of the global climate . Copernicus Climate Change Service Climate Data Store (CDS), Accessed June 20^th 2019. https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/home

Wang, X., Wotton, B. M., Cantin, A. S., Parisien, M. A., Anderson, K., Moore, B., & Flannigan, M. D. (2017). cffdrs: an R package for the Canadian forest fire danger rating system. Ecological Processes, 6(1), 5.

Wotton, B. M., & Flannigan, M. D. (1993). Length of the fire season in a changing climate. The Forestry Chronicle, 69(2), 187-192.