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Wildfire Threat Analysis in a UK Forest-Urban Interface

Julia McMorrow, Jonathan Aylen, Aleksandra Kazmierczak, Rob Gazzard, James Morison, Andy Moffat

In: Met Office 2nd Wildfire Workshop; 03 Dec 2014-04 Dec 2014; Met Office, Exeter. 2014.

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Abstract

We undertook a 6-month, NERC-funded scoping study of Wildfire Threat Analysis (WTA) to test its suitability for a UK forest-urban interface. Threat here is a cumulative combination of three GIS modules: Risk of Ignition (RoI); Hazard (head fire intensity, rate of spread); and Values at Risk (VaR).RoI and VaR modules were successfully developed for a 11x12 km area around Crowthorne/Swinley Forest, where a major fire occurred in May 2011. Guided by expert knowledge at two stakeholder workshops, we adapted the New Zealand WTA framework, producing a data catalogue of > 90 GIS layers. RoI scores were assigned to public access and land cover layers using geo-locations of Incident Recording System vegetation fires and expert elicitation. Lack of suitable fire climate data prevented a Hazard module from being developed. Using stakeholder knowledge, a 25m cell size RoI map and three VaR maps (infrastructure/property, ecosystem services and social vulnerability) were produced from weighted combinations of layers. Taken together, hotspots requiring management were identified.The WTA framework should be tested for other types of UK rural-urban interface, and at coarser scales up to the 2km grid at which probabilistic fire severity data is available. Fine Fuel Moisture Code could be included as a scaling factor within a national RoI model to give spatially-distributed estimates for probability of sustained ignition.

Bibliographic metadata

Type of resource:
Content type:
Type of conference contribution:
Conference title:
Met Office 2nd Wildfire Workshop
Conference venue:
Met Office, Exeter
Conference start date:
2014-12-03
Conference end date:
2014-12-04
Abstract:
We undertook a 6-month, NERC-funded scoping study of Wildfire Threat Analysis (WTA) to test its suitability for a UK forest-urban interface. Threat here is a cumulative combination of three GIS modules: Risk of Ignition (RoI); Hazard (head fire intensity, rate of spread); and Values at Risk (VaR).RoI and VaR modules were successfully developed for a 11x12 km area around Crowthorne/Swinley Forest, where a major fire occurred in May 2011. Guided by expert knowledge at two stakeholder workshops, we adapted the New Zealand WTA framework, producing a data catalogue of > 90 GIS layers. RoI scores were assigned to public access and land cover layers using geo-locations of Incident Recording System vegetation fires and expert elicitation. Lack of suitable fire climate data prevented a Hazard module from being developed. Using stakeholder knowledge, a 25m cell size RoI map and three VaR maps (infrastructure/property, ecosystem services and social vulnerability) were produced from weighted combinations of layers. Taken together, hotspots requiring management were identified.The WTA framework should be tested for other types of UK rural-urban interface, and at coarser scales up to the 2km grid at which probabilistic fire severity data is available. Fine Fuel Moisture Code could be included as a scaling factor within a national RoI model to give spatially-distributed estimates for probability of sustained ignition.

Institutional metadata

University researcher(s):

Record metadata

Manchester eScholar ID:
uk-ac-man-scw:242341
Created by:
Mcmorrow, Julia
Created:
5th December, 2014, 17:24:04
Last modified by:
Mcmorrow, Julia
Last modified:
5th December, 2014, 17:24:04

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