The Fuel Characteristic Classification System
The ongoing development of more sophisticated fire behavior and
fire effects software along with the implementation of wildland
fire emission inventory and large landscape fuel and carbon assessments
has demonstrated the need for a comprehensive software system to
build, characterize, and classify fuelbeds to accurately capture
the structural complexity and geographical diversity of fuel components
across landscapes and provide the ability to assess elements of
human (e.g. logging slash) and natural (e.g. insect and disease)
change.
The Fire and Environmental Research Applications team (FERA) of
the Pacific Northwest Research Station Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences
Laboratory, U.S Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, has developed
a National System of Fuel Characteristic Classification (FCCS) to
accommodate this need.
The system offers consistently organized fuels data along with
numerical inputs to fire behavior, fire effects, and dynamic vegetation
models.
- Users can access a fuelbed from the national fuelbed database
within the FCCS that was compiled from published, unpublished
literature, fuels photo series, fuels data sets and expert opinion
or modify existing descriptions with enhanced information to create
a set of fuelbeds to represent a particular scale of interest.
- When the user has completed editing the fuelbed data, FCCS
reports the assigned and calculated fuel characteristics for each
existing fuelbed component including the trees, shrubs, grasses,
woody fuels, litter, and duff.
- The system also calculates a surface fire behavior, crown fire,
and available fuel potential index between 0- 9 for each FCCS
National or customized fuelbed. These FCCS fire potentials facilitate
communication among users and provide an index representation
of the intrinsic capacity of each fuelbed for surface fire behavior,
crown fire and available consumption of fuels.
FCCS v. 2.0 enhancements include:
- The ability for a user to define environmental variables such
as moisture
- Predictions of surface fire behavior, based on both benchmark
and user-specified environmental conditions.
- Reports of carbon storage by fuelbed category and subcategory
- Predictions of the amount of combustible carbon in each category
and subcategory based on selected fuel moisture scenarios.
- Reports in English and metric units
- Ability for users to upload photos to represent each fuelbed
- Batch mode to provide output on a set of fuelbeds.
FCCS v 1.1 offered the following modifications:
- The program reports predicted surface fire behavior, including
reaction intensity (BTU ft-2 min-1), flame length(ft), and rate
of spread (ft min-1), under benchmark environmental conditions.
Benchmark environmental conditions are:
- 0% slope
- 4 mph windspeed
- Dry fuel conditions (D2L2 moisture scenario after Andrews
et al. 2005).
- Using a dry fuel moisture scenario (D2L2), FCCS suggests crosswalks
from reported fuelbeds to the original 13 surface fire behavior
fuel models
and the 40 standard fuel models (Scott
and Burgan 2005).
- The FCCS webpage now includes
references in. pdf format for each of the
FCCS fuelbeds.
Team Lead: Roger
Ottmar
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