Data driven application CeaseFire to assist fire managers
The fire detection and monitoring data provided by LSA SAF offer valuable insights for decision-makers
- Dec. 10, 2024
Climate and weather are major drivers of fire activity in Mediterranean Europe. The CeaseFire application was developed by Instituto Dom Luiz (IDL) of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon as a web and mobile application. Its main purpose is to assist forest managers and firefighters in fire prevention and combat.
CeaseFire aims at linking academia with best practices within the fire community at large by providing easily accessible and simple-to-use products that are customized to specific user needs. Products supplied include the set of indices that integrate the Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI) System, classes of fire danger, seasonal outlooks, hourly forecasts and information for managed burning.
Fig.1: CeaseFire FWI contour lines superimposed on percentiles (colored background) as derived from a 30-year climatological period. The tool illustrates the fire conditions during the Covilhã wildfire on 8 August 2022.
The platform relies on information provided by the LSA SAF operationally disseminated suite of wildfire-related products: Fire radiative power (FRP-Pixel, LSA-502) and Fire Risk Mapping (FRMv2, LSA-504.2). The aim is to provide users with easy, fast and friendly access to the products, i.e., interactive maps and charts.
An additional goal is to increase the efficiency in fire risk management by making available to the operational community better information about wildfires, fire danger and damage as well as fire recovery. The platform consists of the following sections: User, Danger, Prescribed Fire and Data Download.
The main part of the application is the Danger section that provides the following information: Canadian Forest Fire Weather Index System (CFFWIS), Fire Danger, Hourly Data, Alerts, Seasonal Outlook, Historical Archive and Outlook for Mediterranean Europe.
This section provides necessary information about fire danger and assists users on the fire prevention and planning actions. In Fig. 1, a map is presented of FWI values (displayed as contours) for a specific day of the year that are superimposed on a climatological 30-year background (colored areas) that is calculated for that day. Upon selecting a particular pixel on the map, the application can also provide supplementary information, such as time series for various CFFWIS components, i.e., Initial Spread Index, Build-Up Index, etc.-
FWI values as well as fire danger (that are a part of the FRMv2 product) are inputs to the CeaseFire application. FRMv2 was developed by combining historical values of fire radiative power, FWI and other auxiliary data. More details in the algorithm theoretical basis document.
Fire danger is estimated based on daily probabilities of exceedance of daily energy released by fires occurring at the pixel level. Classes are then statistically defined according to values of probability of exceedance and of the respective deviations from the expected value.
The Danger section of the CeaseFire application provides six classes of fire danger in different colors (see Fig. 2): Low, Moderate, High, Very High, Extreme and Exceptional. In the event of a fire, additional information based on satellite observations can be found on the graph.
In the Prescribed Fire section, users are able to access interactive maps offering valuable insights to identify optimal timeframes for conducting activities related to prescribed burning in eucalyptus, pine, and shrub areas. Furthermore, users can also retrieve information on CFFWIS values for any selected location.
Fig. 2: CeaseFire application: overlaying the fire danger classes with satellite-detected active fires at the time of the Covilhã wildfire on 8 August 2022.
This article gives an overview of the CeaseFire application, which takes advantage of the LSA SAF suite of wildfire products and provides easily accessible and well-prepared information on fire events. The platform connects decision-makers, researchers, operational communities with users in one place in order to track and effectively mitigate wildfires.
Additional information about the CeaseFire site may be found in:
DaCamara, C.C.; Trigo, R.M.; Pinto, M.M.; Nunes, S.A.; Trigo, I.F.; Gouveia, C.M.; Rainha, M. CeaseFire: a website to assist fire managers in Portugal. In Advances in Forest Fire Research 2018; Viegas, D. X., Ed.; Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra: Coimbra, Portugal, 2018; pp. 941-949, doi: 10.14195/978-989-26-16-506_103