Assessing Model-Generated Predictions of NFDRS Indexes

The National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) has long been used to anticipate wildfire severity, allocate resources, and to plan for prescribed fires. Meteorological observations collected at widely separated, representative weather stations are used to compute indexes which estimate fire danger for each day. The same observational variables used to compute NFDRS indexes are routinely available from operationally run mesoscale meteorological models. Consequently gridded predictions of several indexes are now available at regional to national scales. The observed indexes at selected weather observation stations are compared with model-generated predicted indexes over the course of the fire season to evaluate the usefulness of the modeled data.