Fire Weather Index

The Fire Weather Index (FWI) is relevant to forestry, local planning and disaster risk management. This Index is part of the Drought Hazard type of the Wet and Dry category of the classification.

A higher index value indicates better weather conditions for wildfires and thus a higher risk.

Definition

Fire Weather Index (Dimensionless). The Fire Weather Index (FWI) is a meteorologically based index used worldwide to estimate fire danger. It is developed by the Canadian Forestry Service to estimate forest fire ignition and spread conditions based on several weather variables (temperature, precipitation, relative humidity, and wind speed).

Data Sources

The data was assembled on behalf of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) based on reanalysis data hosted on the C3S Climate Data Store (CDS). The observed index data are from a dataset based on the ERA5 reanalysis and updated in near real time. It is produced by the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (CEMS) for the Global ECMWF Fire Forecasting model (GEFF) and the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS). The simulated index data are from a set of 5 multi-model simulations from the EURO-CORDEX experiment. These simulations have a daily temporal resolution, a spatial resolution of 0.1° x 0.1° and cover scenarios RCP4.5 and RCP8.5. More technical specifications can be found in the datasets documentation:

• Fire danger indices historical data from the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (link)
• Fire danger indicators for Europe from 1970 to 2098 derived from climate projections (link)

Supporting Information

Further information about this application can be found in the Product User Guide (PUG) of the application in the documentation resources of the CDS. Related information can also be found on other sections of the EEA site: The Index based interactive EEA report: Wet and Dry — Fire Weather (link).

Data download

The aggregated data shown on the map can be downloaded as csv files.