QUEST Theme 3 - FireMAFS (Fire Modelling and Forecasting System) Project

Introduction

Fire is the most important disturbance agent worldwide in terms of area and variety of biomes affected, a major mechanism by which carbon is transferred from the land to the atmosphere, and a globally significant source of aerosols and many trace gas species. Despite such clear coupling between fire, climate, and vegetation, fire is not currently modelled as an interactive component of the climate/earth systems models of full complexity or intermediate complexity that are used to model terrestrial ecosystem processes principally for simulating CO2 exchanges.

The objective of FireMAFS is to resolve these limitations by developing a robust method to forecast fire activity (fire 'danger' indices, ignition probabilities, burnt area, fire intensity etc) via a process-based model of fire-vegetation interactions, tested, improved, and constrained using state-of-the-art EO data products and driven by seasonal weather forecasts issued with many months lead-time.

The Earth system modelling community, in particular those developing and running Dynamic Global Vegetation Models (DGVM's) for use in understanding climate-vegetation feedbacks, will be primary beneficiaries of this project. Furthermore, to assist in managing fire-prone ecosystems, forest and land-management, agencies and governmental organisations require early warning systems to identify in advance periods of extreme fire danger in order to aid pre-planning, including possible implementation of fire prevention, fire detection schemes and pre-suppression plans.

Availability of data and file format

Data are stored in the BADC QUEST FireMAFS project data archive.

The data filenames should follow the BADC File Name convention and the data file format should be NetCDF or NASA-Ames.

Access to data and information

Please refer to the QUEST Conditions of Access page for details on access restrictions.

Citation

et. al

Date of citation

Who to contact

FireMAFS is led by Prof Martin Wooster (Kings College, London) with 9 co-investigators from UCL, University of Leister, University of Reading, ESSC, University of Bristol and CEH.

Each QUEST project will have a designated "data co-ordinator" to ensure good communication with the QUEST core team/BADC regarding data issues, and to ensure that each project meets its data provision obligations. The data co-ordinator for the QUEST FireMAFS project is to be determined.

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