Forecasting diurnal variations in fire intensity to enhance wildland firefighter safety

The extent to which the concept of displaying the diurnal variation in Byram's fire intensity on a daily basis during the fire season has been applied in the Province of British Columbia, Canada, to ensure safe and productive wildland firefighting work practices is described. This has been made possible by using the Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System coupled with fire weather forecasts and local information on the state of the fire environment in regards to fuel types, fuel moisture conditions and slope steepness. The resulting operational fire management tool has been the development, beginning in the mid 1990s, of the British Columbia Fire Weather and Behavior Advisory and Warning System. Potential areas for improvement in this system are detailed.

[1]  Bret W. Butler,et al.  Firefighter Safety Zones: A Theoretical Model Based on Radiative Heating , 1998 .

[2]  M. E. Alexander,et al.  Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System: An Overview , 1989 .

[3]  Barbara Adams,et al.  Fundamentals of wildland fire fighting , 1998 .

[4]  A. G. Wilson,et al.  A simple device for calculating the probability of a house surviving a bushfire , 1988 .

[5]  C. E. Van Wagner,et al.  Development and structure of the Canadian Forest Fire Weather Index System , 1987 .

[6]  A. Trevitt,et al.  Forecasting diurnal variations in meteorological parameters for predicting fire behaviour , 1989 .

[7]  Janice L. Coen,et al.  A Coupled Atmosphere-Fire Model: Role of the Convective Froude Number and Dynamic Fingering at the Fireline , 1996 .

[8]  J. Gómez-Tejedor,et al.  A mesoscale model application to fire weather winds , 1999 .

[9]  Martin E. Alexander,et al.  Elliptical-fire perimeter- and area-intensity distributions , 1992 .

[10]  Mark J. Schroeder,et al.  Fire weather: a guide for application of meteorological information to forest fire control operations. , 1970 .

[11]  R. M. Nelson.  Byram Derivation of the Energy Criterion for Forest and Wildland Fires , 1993 .

[12]  M. E. Alexander,et al.  Systems for Rating Fire Danger and Predicting Fire Behavior Used in Canada 1 , 1999 .

[13]  K. Ryan,et al.  How to estimate tree mortality resulting from underburning , 1988 .

[14]  B. Lawson,et al.  Weather in the Canadian forest fire danger rating system. A user guide to national standards and practices. , 1978 .

[15]  Andrew A. G. Wilson.  Width of firebreak that is necessary to stop grass fires: some field experiments , 1988 .

[16]  Martin E. Alexander,et al.  Crown fire thresholds in exotic pine plantations of Australasia , 1998 .

[17]  Martin E. Alexander,et al.  Fire behaviour as a factor in forest and rural fire suppression. , 2000 .

[18]  B. Gardiner,et al.  MODELLING SURFACE AIRFLOW FOR FOREST AND RURAL FIRE DANGER RATING: COMPARISONS BETWEEN ACTUAL OBSERVATIONS AND PREDICTED VALUES , 1998 .

[19]  N. Cheney,et al.  Quantifying bushfires , 1990 .

[20]  Martin E. Alexander,et al.  Calculating and interpreting forest fire intensities , 1982 .

[21]  Rodman R. Linn,et al.  Coupled Atmospheric Fire Modeling Employing the Method of Averages , 2000 .