Relating Burning Index to Wildfire Workload Over Broad Geographic Areas

1991 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 235 ◽  
Author(s):  
R Mees ◽  
R Chase

The burning index of the National Fire Danger Rating System is designed to measure potential fire workload over broad geographic areas that can be repre sented as being homogeneous with respect to fuel, topo graphic, and weather conditions. The utility of this index is confirmed by its relation to three measures of fire workload-number of fires, area burned, and number of personnel used in fire suppression for National Forests in southern California. The distributions of these mea sures over 15 years were skewed heavily to the right ("heavy-tailed distributions"). We selected the75 th, 90th, and 95th percentile values of each distribution at ten percentile values of the burning index to investigate and display the association between fire workload and the burning index. The results provide a distinct view of the direct relationship between wildfire workload and critical burning index values for the southern California area as a whole, and point to the potential value of this approach for anticipating fire control problems in other areas.

2005 ◽  
Vol 156 (9) ◽  
pp. 331-337
Author(s):  
Marco Conedera ◽  
Patrick Roth ◽  
Gabriele Corti ◽  
Daniele Ryser

Fire-services are often unable to obtain a rapid overview of problems connected with wildfire fighting. In the last few decades the ideology for fire fighting has shifted from fire control(basically fire suppression) to fire management (including prevention,planning, and simulating). As a result, fire management is now included in landscape planning processes. The preliminary step in fire management is fire risk analysis, which takes into account fire hazard (probability and expected severity of a fire) and the outcome (total impact on the affected environment). In this contribution we present an approach for assessing fire risk on local levels in southern Switzerland.


2012 ◽  
Vol 610-613 ◽  
pp. 2501-2505
Author(s):  
Zhi Hao Sun ◽  
Jun Cheng Jiang ◽  
Lin Qiao

Extinguishing performance of portable water mist system was studied in this paper, considering the effects of additive addition and its type. The experimental results were statistically processed and numerically analysed by mathematical software. The results demonstrated that water mist with additive solution can extinguish pool fire efficiently due to physical and chemical mechanisms. The salt solution produces better fire control result than surfactant solution at low concentration, whereas the surfactant solution brings the better one at high concentration. Furthermore, the salt solution and surfactant solution have similar fire expansion behaviours to pure water in fire suppression with portable water mist system. The study, based on the application of the portable water mist system with additives, revealed that the system performed well on fire suppression and could be useful on movable fire control.


1991 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 97 ◽  
Author(s):  
R Mees

Under severe fire weather conditions arson is believed to be the primary cause of large wildland fires in southern California. Wildland fire suppression personnel and the public use the the expression "This weather brings out the arsonists" to indicate their awareness of the high potential for large arson-caused fires under these conditions. To determine the accuracy of this statement, fire occurrence and weather data were analyzed for four southern California National Forests for a 10-year period (1975–1984). The results showed that the proportion of arson and non-arson person-caused fires remained the same under most fire-danger conditions; however, a much higher percentage of arson fires became large fires when fire danger was severe. Furthermore, the timing of the arsonist contributed to the frequent occurrence of large arson fires. The data presented here refute the idea that most arson fires occur under severe weather conditions and at the same time-validate the utility of maintaining arson prevention programs during most weather conditions.


1988 ◽  
Vol 18 (12) ◽  
pp. 1641-1649 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara G. Brown ◽  
Allan H. Murphy

Decision analysis is used to model the rational use and estimate the economic value of weather forecasts in a specific decision-making situation relating to wildfire suppression mobilization. In this situation two fires in a national forest that differ only in timber type and location may require fire-suppression assistance from an adjacent national forest, depending on the weather conditions. The assistance available in the adjacent national forest consists of one 20-man hand crew and one bulldozer. Decisions regarding whether to request assistance and whether and where to deploy these suppression resources are assumed to be made on the basis of weather forecasts. Weather forecasts are found to be useful in this context because they enable the fire manager to select in an optimal manner the fire at which the suppression resources are likely to be most beneficial on each occasion. Specifically, state of the art forecasts have an expected economic value of almost $61 00 in this situation, and perfect information would have a value of approximately $16 600. Sensitivity analysis reveals that these results are quite sensitive to variations in fire outcome (i.e., numbers of acres burned). Improvements in forecast quality would lead to substantial increases in the economic value of weather forecasts in this two-fire situation.


2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (7) ◽  
pp. 587 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher D. O'Connor ◽  
David E. Calkin ◽  
Matthew P. Thompson

During active fire incidents, decisions regarding where and how to safely and effectively deploy resources to meet management objectives are often made under rapidly evolving conditions, with limited time to assess management strategies or for development of backup plans if initial efforts prove unsuccessful. Under all but the most extreme fire weather conditions, topography and fuels are significant factors affecting potential fire spread and burn severity. We leverage these relationships to quantify the effects of topography, fuel characteristics, road networks and fire suppression effort on the perimeter locations of 238 large fires, and develop a predictive model of potential fire control locations spanning a range of fuel types, topographic features and natural and anthropogenic barriers to fire spread, on a 34000km2 landscape in southern Idaho and northern Nevada. The boosted logistic regression model correctly classified final fire perimeter locations on an independent dataset with 69% accuracy without consideration of weather conditions on individual fires. The resulting fire control probability surface has potential for reducing unnecessary exposure for fire responders, coordinating pre-fire planning for operational fire response, and as a network of locations to incorporate into spatial fire planning to better align fire operations with land management objectives.


2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (94) ◽  
pp. 55-61
Author(s):  
R.O. Myalkovsky

Goal. The purpose of the research was to determine the influence of meteorological factors on potato yield in the conditions of the Right Bank Forest-steppe of Ukraine. Methods.Field, analytical and statistical. Results.It was established that among the mid-range varieties Divo stands out with a yield of 42.3 t/ha, Malin white – 39.8 t/ha, and Legend – 37.1 t/ ha. The most favourable weather and climatic conditions for the production of potato tubers were for the Divo 2011 variety with a yield of 45.9 t/ha and 2013 – 45.1 t/ha. For the Legenda variety 2016, the yield of potato tubers is 40.6 t/ha and 2017 – 43.2 t/ha. Malin White 2013 is 41.4 t/ha and 2017 42.1 t/ha. The average varieties of potatoes showed a slightly lower yield on average over the years of research. However, among the varieties is allocated Nadiyna – 40.3 t/ha, Slovyanka – 37.2 t/ ha and Vera 33.8 t/ha. Among the years, the most high-yielding for the Vera variety was 2016 with a yield of 36.6 t/ha and 2017 year – 37.8 t/ha. Varieties Slovyanka and Nadiyna 2011 and 2012 with yields of 42.6 and 44.3 t/ha and 46.5 and 45.3 t/ha, respectively. Characterizing the yield of potato tubers of medium-late varieties over the years of research, there was a decrease in this indicator compared with medium-early and middle-aged varieties. However, the high yield of the varieties of Dar is allocated – 40.0 t/ha, Alladin – 33.6 t/ha and Oxamit 31.3 t/ha. Among the years, the most favourable ones were: for Oxamit and Alladin – 2011 – 33.5 and 36.5 t/ha, and 2017 – 34.1 and 36.4 t/ha, respectively. Favourable years for harvesting varieties were 2011 and 2012 with yields of 45.7 and 45.8 t/ha. Thus, the highest yield of potato tubers on average over the years of studies of medium-early varieties of 41.2-43.3 t / ha were provided by weather conditions of 2011 and 2017 years, medium-ripe varieties 41.0-41.1 - 2012 and 2011, medium- late 37,6-38,5 t / ha - 2012 and 2011, respectively.


Author(s):  
Stefan Thurner ◽  
Rudolf Hanel ◽  
Peter Klimekl

Phenomena, systems, and processes are rarely purely deterministic, but contain stochastic,probabilistic, or random components. For that reason, a probabilistic descriptionof most phenomena is necessary. Probability theory provides us with the tools for thistask. Here, we provide a crash course on the most important notions of probabilityand random processes, such as odds, probability, expectation, variance, and so on. Wedescribe the most elementary stochastic event—the trial—and develop the notion of urnmodels. We discuss basic facts about random variables and the elementary operationsthat can be performed on them. We learn how to compose simple stochastic processesfrom elementary stochastic events, and discuss random processes as temporal sequencesof trials, such as Bernoulli and Markov processes. We touch upon the basic logic ofBayesian reasoning. We discuss a number of classical distribution functions, includingpower laws and other fat- or heavy-tailed distributions.


Entropy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 70
Author(s):  
Mei Ling Huang ◽  
Xiang Raney-Yan

The high quantile estimation of heavy tailed distributions has many important applications. There are theoretical difficulties in studying heavy tailed distributions since they often have infinite moments. There are also bias issues with the existing methods of confidence intervals (CIs) of high quantiles. This paper proposes a new estimator for high quantiles based on the geometric mean. The new estimator has good asymptotic properties as well as it provides a computational algorithm for estimating confidence intervals of high quantiles. The new estimator avoids difficulties, improves efficiency and reduces bias. Comparisons of efficiencies and biases of the new estimator relative to existing estimators are studied. The theoretical are confirmed through Monte Carlo simulations. Finally, the applications on two real-world examples are provided.


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