Assessment of Long-term Fire Weather Threats to British Columbia's Electric Grid

Determining long-term fire weather threats to the electric grid is crucial for adapting infrastructure to the changing wildfire season. This study hopes to quantify a probable maximum fire weather risk metric to identify the highest wildfire threat locations for British Columbia’s electric grid infrastructure, along with future climate projections to target risk mitigation practices. The first step in this work is a verification of fire regime types using ignition data from the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System database. The identification of fire regime types employs historical wildfire ignition data to group together areas with similar wildfire behavior regimes based on fire size, frequency, ignition type, and seasonality. Incident data from previous interactions of wildfires with electric grid infrastructure in British Columbia and historical fire weather forecasts from the FireSmoke Canada website will also be incorporated into the development of a risk map for British Columbia. To determine the most useful variables, an evaluation of various fire weather metrics from the Canadian Forest Fire Weather Index System and the Canadian Forest Fire Behavior Prediction System will be conducted to identify the best metrics for future climate projections in the development of a risk map.