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). This dataset consists of risk scores calculated using a combination of historical Fire Weather Index (FWI) values between the years 2012-2022 and fuel loads that incorporate the characteristics of dominant land cover (e.g. litter, shrubland). It does not depict wildfire but rather depicts the risks of the conditions suitable for wildfires.
Technical Description
The Wildfire Historical Risk product captures the recent near-historical risk of wildfires across the world using well-established fire risk indices, as well as a custom proprietary vegetative fuel load dataset.
This layer displays the historical fire risk or the likelihood of fire occurrence in the past decade. It identifies regions which, due to their localized climate and vegetation characteristics, are more likely to experience wildfires. It consists of risk scores calculated using a combination of historical Fire Weather Index (FWI) values between the years 2012-2022 and fuel loads that incorporate the characteristics of dominant landcover (e.g. litter, shrubland) and species in different biomes (e.g. tropical subtropical moist broadleaf forests).
The FWI is an index which indicates fire danger due to climate factors such as temperature, wind and precipitation. An extensive record of historical fire weather information is used to identify anomalously high fire weather conditions which are scaled, corrected and combined with our proprietary fuel layer.
Historical wildfire events were used in the course of validation, which demonstrated that the areas of observed fire corresponded to elevated risk values.
The FWI is an index which indicates fire danger due to climate factors such as temperature, wind and precipitation. An extensive record of historical fire weather information is used to identify anomalously high fire weather conditions which are scaled, corrected and combined with our proprietary fuel layer. The fire risk scores are capped to fall between 0 and 100, representing low to extreme fire risk. All open water areas have been masked in this layer. Additionally, urban cores have also been masked, but fire risk is still calculated at the urban-wildland interface.
This dataset contains the following fields:
- fire_risk_score: The raw wildfire risk score at a point location. The FWI is an index which indicates fire danger due to climate factors such as temperature, wind and precipitation. An extensive record of historical fire weather information is used to identify anomalously high fire weather conditions which are scaled, corrected and combined with our proprietary fuel layer. All open water areas and urban cores have been masked. These values range from 0.0 - 160.0.
- fire_risk_index: This version of fire risk includes the same methodology as listed above but with an additional calculation to cap the data to within a 0-100 distribution.
- fire_risk_class: The fire risk classification for each value. Values are categorized into a 1-5 risk classification system, ranging from Low to Extreme, based on an analysis of historically observed fires in relation to the fire_risk_index . The risk classifications are defined as follows:
- fire_risk_index < 28
- fire_risk_index < 59
- fire_risk_index < 67
- fire_risk_index < 76
- fire_risk_index ? 76