Fire Weather Index assessment and visualization

SIGFRIDO WAIDELICH; VIVIANA ZIMMERMAN; KARINA LANERI; MÓNICA DENHAM

Río Cuarto, Córdoba

Congreso; Congreso Argentino de Ciencas de la Computación CACIC 2019; 2019

FCEFQyN Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto

The Fire Weather Index (FWI) is extensively used in Argentina to support operative preventive measures for forest fires management. This index describes the moisture content of three different fuel types and the effect of the wind in the fire behaviour. During last years our team had developed a wildfire simulator with several functionalities according to firefighters requirements. In this work we include the spatial FWI visualization on our simulator, in order to describe forest fire risks depending on FWI and fuel type of Northwest Patagonian forests of Argentina. This additional functionality allows the user to visualize the landscape map of fire risk. This tool is of special interest not only because it could be useful for all fire stations in Argentina, but also because it will be taken as input information of a fire propagation model under development. In this context, the need of modelling the impact of weather on the fuel becomes essential for the accuracy of forest fire simulations.