Abstract
Forest fires are an integral part of the natural Earth system dynamics, however they are becoming more devastating and less predictable as anthropogenic climate change exacerbates their impacts. In order to advance fire science, fire danger reanalysis products can be used as proxy for fire weather observations with the advantage of being homogeneously distributed both in space and time. This manuscript describes a reanalysis dataset of fire danger indices based on the Canadian Fire Weather Index system and the ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis dataset, which supersedes the previous dataset based on ERA-Interim. The new fire danger reanalysis dataset provides a number of benefits compared to the one based on ERA-Interim: it relies on better estimates of precipitation, evaporation and soil moisture, it is available in a deterministic form as well as a probabilistic ensemble and it is characterised by a considerably higher spatial resolution. It is a valuable resource for forestry agencies and scientists in the field of wildfire danger modeling and beyond. The global dataset is produced by ECMWF, as the computational centre of the European Forest Fire information System (EFFIS) of the Copernicus Emergency Management Service, and it is made available free of charge through the Climate Data Store.
Highlights
Forest fires are an integral part of the natural Earth system dynamics, they are becoming more devastating and less predictable as anthropogenic climate change exacerbates their impacts[1]
The Fire Weather Index (FWI) system is used to estimate fire danger in Europe and worldwide[10,11] and it is an important component of the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) as well as the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS, https://gwis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/)
This paper describes GEFF-ERA5, the reanalysis dataset of FWI fire behavior indices based on the ERA5 reanalysis, which supersedes the previous fire danger reanalysis based on ERA-Interim (GEFF-ERAI12)
Summary
Forest fires are an integral part of the natural Earth system dynamics, they are becoming more devastating and less predictable as anthropogenic climate change exacerbates their impacts[1]. The catalogue is linked to the Copernicus Emergency Management Service, which provides timely geospatial information in support of emergency management activities following a disaster This is an on-demand service, available since 2014, that can only be activated by authorised users and relies on limited resources (there is a limit on the number of multiple simultaneous activations that can be processed). The FWI system is used to estimate fire danger in Europe and worldwide[10,11] and it is an important component of the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) as well as the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS, https://gwis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/). GEFF-ERA5 is made available as a deterministic as well as probabilistic model output, the latter allows to quantify uncertainties in the estimations which was not possible previously This dataset is a valuable resource for forestry agencies and scientists in the field of wildfire danger modeling and beyond. The Copernicus programme is committed to release these layers free of charge and in the future
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