Description
Wildfires cause significant economic impacts through financial losses, higher insurance premiums, and losses in sectors like agriculture, tourism, and utilities due to destruction and reduced air quality. Wildfire risk is a combination of factors that can lead to wildfire including both weather conditions and fuel loads (fuels are considered anything that can catch fire). It does not depict wildfire but rather depicts the risks of the conditions suitable for wildfires.
Technical Description
The Current Wildfire Risk provides a current look at the wildfire risk for the next 3 days across the globe. An extensive record of historical fire weather information is used to identify anomalously high fire weather conditions in daily forecasts of fire weather, which are combined with our proprietary fuel layer to produce a scored risk value. The values range from 0 - 100 representing low to extreme fire risk. The spatial scale of this data is 100 m/pixel and new forecasts are produced daily. Urban/developed areas are masked from this dataset, but the risk scores are still calculated at the urban-wildland interface.
This Current Risk layer looks at the maximum of the daily wildfire risk scores across the region for the next 1-3 days.
This dataset contains the following fields:
- risk_index: The maximum daily wildfire risk score at that location for the next 1-3 days. The values range from 0-100 representing low to extreme fire risk.
- risk_category: The maximum daily wildfire risk score at that location for the next 1-3 days. The values range from 0-4 representing low to extreme fire risk. These are categorized risk_index values, where observations of historical fires have been used to build a classification system into Low (risk index values in the range 0-28), Moderate (risk index values in the range 28-59), High (risk index values in the range 59-67), Very High (risk index values in the range 67-76), and Extreme (risk index values in the range 76+) risk categories.