At the International Association of Wildland Fire’s Fuels conference currently underway in Albuquerque, Research Ecologist Matt Jolly’s presentation on “Mapping extreme fire weather and its impact on firefighter safety” was very interesting. In his allotted 20 minutes he began by talking about the rollout that is nearly complete of the third revision of the National Fire Danger Rating System.
Mr. Jolly described the development and evaluation of an extreme fire weather metric called the Severe Fire Weather Potential Index. The Index is strongly correlated to wildland fire occurrence and intensity detected by the MODIS satellite and is a strong predictor of wildland firefighter entrapments and fatalities from 1979 to 2017.
Mr. Jolly said some firefighters have told him that the WildfireSafe app which has been in the prototype stage for the last three years is a useful tool for accurately predicting the fire danger at the local level.
These images were snapped with a cell phone during Mr. Jolly’s presentation.