Abstract
Abstract. Daily polar-orbiting satellite MODIS thermal detections since 2002 were used as the baseline for quantifying wildfire activity in the mixed grass and agricultural lands of southernmost central Canada. This satellite thermal detection record includes both the responsible use of fire (e.g. for clearing crop residues, grassland ecosystem management, and traditional burning) and wildfires in grasslands and agricultural lands that pose a risk to communities and other values. A database of known wildfire evacuations and fires otherwise requiring suppression assistance from provincial forest fire agencies was used to train a model that classified satellite fire detections based on weather, seasonality, and other environmental conditions. A separate dataset of high resolution (Landsat 8 thermal anomalies) of responsible agricultural fire use (e.g. crop residue burning) was collected and used to train the classification model to the converse. Key common attributes of wildfires in the region included occurrence on or before the first week of May with high rates of grass curing, wind speeds over 30 km h−1, relative humidity values typically below 40 %, and fires that are detected in the mid-afternoon or evening. Overall, grassland wildfire is found to be restricted to a small number of days per year, allowing for the future development of public awareness and warning systems targeted to the identified subset of weather and phenological conditions.
Highlights
Wildfire is a widespread and commonplace phenomenon in Canada, with contexts ranging from an integral component of traditional land use (Lewis et al, 2018), a purely natural disturbance process with little human impact (Whitman et al, 2018), to a devastating natural hazard to communities (Christianson et al, 2019)
The overall goal of this study is to examine the differing environmental conditions most common during agricultural fires and to contrast that with documented grassland wildfires in the region
Each thermal detection was associated with gridded data including grass curing (NDVI), as well as surface weather and fire weather variables from the Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI) System (Table 1)
Summary
Wildfire is a widespread and commonplace phenomenon in Canada, with contexts ranging from an integral component of traditional land use (Lewis et al, 2018), a purely natural disturbance (i.e. lightning ignition) process with little human impact (Whitman et al, 2018), to a devastating natural hazard to communities (Christianson et al, 2019). Fire (both human and natural ignition) is most common in Canada in its interior, west of the Great Lakes and east of the Rocky Mountains, where a belt of high fire frequency extends from the subarctic forests of the Deh Cho (Mackenzie Valley) through to the drier southern boreal forest–grassland transition (Boulanger et al, 2014) Within this broad north–south transect, the density of values at risk varies greatly, from sparse communities in the northern forest with limited industrial activities to a dense matrix of industry with dispersed agriculture and rural habitation (Johnston and Flannigan, 2018). Though smaller, localized grasslands in a larger matrix of forest are readily integrated into local wildfire-likelihood assessments (Parisien et al, 2013), large-scale assessments of wildfire likelihood are often based on modelling that utilizes forest fire management agency records (Parisien et al, 2013; Stockdale et al, 2019)
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