Fire Danger Monitoring - Satellite Monitoring and Forecasting of Fire Danger over Large Areas

To plan for early and successful fire containment, land and fire managers rely on accurate and timely information on the potential for fires to ignite and spread. USGS EROS Data Center (EDC) scientists in collaboration with scientists at the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) developed the Fire Potential Index (FPI) in 1997 to help provide that information. The FPI assesses the probability of occurrence of fire for forests, rangelands, and grasslands, at a 1km resolution for the conterminous US and Alaska.

Fire planners and managers in 13 federal and state land management organizations within the western United States and Alaska are testing the value of the FPI. The FPI supplements traditional information sources in daily wildland fire decision-making. The European Union (EU), through the Joint Research Center (JRC) in Ispra, Italy has calibrated the FPI for all of Europe and is presently calculating the FPI on a near-time daily basis.

The index is updated daily to reflect the changing weather conditions and is posted by the USFS on their Web site (see below) as an experimental product.

Fire danger monitoring products are available in an interactive mapping service at http://gisdata.usgs.gov/website/IVM

U.S. Forest Service Wildland Fire Assessment System, look under "experimental products at: http://www.wfas.net

Paper: Using GIS to assess forest fire hazard in the Mediterranean region of the United States, in 1997 ESRI User Conference, [17th], [San Diego, California], July 8-11, 1997, Proceedings: [Redlands, California], Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc.,