Caliver: An R package for CALIbration and VERification of forest fire gridded model outputs.

Claudia Vitolo,Mirko D’Andrea,Francesca Di Giuseppe,Juan A Añel

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0189419

Abstract

The name caliver stands for CALIbration and VERification of forest fire gridded model outputs. This is a package developed for the R programming language and available under an APACHE-2 license from a public repository. In this paper we describe the functionalities of the package and give examples using publicly available datasets. Fire danger model outputs are taken from the modeling components of the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) and observed burned areas from the Global Fire Emission Database (GFED). Complete documentation, including a vignette, is also available within the package.

Highlights

Forecasting wildfires is a complex task, theoretically challenging and computationally demanding
As the ignition is casual and very difficult to predict, fire prediction systems, used in forest management, are design to highlight these favorable weather conditions which would allow sustained fire activity and not actual fire activities. On these premises is based one of the most widespread fire danger rating system, the Canadian forest service’s Fire Weather Index (FWI) [4, 5] which is selected here to showcase the capability of the proposed package
The calibration task implies the analysis of the soil and weather conditions as synthesized by the FWI for a long period in the past, while the verification consists of the analysis of the performance of the system and danger levels applied to observed events

Summary

Introduction

Forecasting wildfires is a complex task, theoretically challenging and computationally demanding. As the ignition is casual and very difficult to predict, fire prediction systems, used in forest management, are design to highlight these favorable weather conditions which would allow sustained fire activity and not actual fire activities On these premises is based one of the most widespread fire danger rating system, the Canadian forest service’s Fire Weather Index (FWI) [4, 5] which is selected here to showcase the capability of the proposed package. The calibration task implies the analysis of the soil and weather conditions as synthesized by the FWI for a long period in the past, while the verification consists of the analysis of the performance of the system and danger levels applied to observed events. In the light of these requirements, we have developed an open-source tool called caliver that contains reproducible algorithms for the calibration and verification of the FWI danger levels. Opening the code to the scrutiny of other experts increases the chances to implement more robust solutions and avoids duplication of efforts

Datasets for testing

Source code availability and documentation

Conclusions

Findings

15. ERA-Interim