5th Symposium on Fire and Forest Meteorology and the 2nd International Wildland Fire Ecology and Fire Management Congress

Wednesday, 19 November 2003: 5:00 PM
Fire weather network analysis for British Columbia
Francis M. Fujioka, USDA Forest Service, Riverside, CA; and J. Beck and E. Meyer
With more than 200 fire weather stations in the Province, British Columbia’s data coverage is among the best of fire weather networks. The BC Forests Protection Program is nevertheless conducting a rigorous evaluation of the effectiveness of its network. In this initial effort, we begin such an evaluation for the southeast portion of the Province by examining the statistical variance of the Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI), which is used with the Build-up Index to determine fire danger class. We summarize the space/time variability of the FWI using time-dependent semivariograms, which may subsequently be used to redesign the network objectively, by adding, removing, or relocating stations. Although this work is still in progress, we will describe the complete procedure for accomplishing network evaluation and design.

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