Fire weather and fuel moisture controls on wildfire activity - present and future.

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On average, 7,000 wildland fires burn about 2.5 million ha (about half the size of Nova Scotia) every year. Canadian fire management agencies spend $800 million protecting communities and economic interests including our forests. Fire management is a major aspect of forest management. Currently, Canadian fire management agencies use the Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System (CFFDRS) to determine wildland fire danger. A key component of the CFFDRS system is the Fire Weather Index (FWI) System that takes daily observations of air temperature, 24 hour precipitation, relative humidity and wind speed to derive the fuel moisture of fine fuels, the duff layer as well as deeper organic material. Fuel moisture is the most important factor that determines if a fire will ignite and spread and how intense the fire will be. My long-term objectives are to continue to explore the relationships between weather, vegetation(fuel) and wildfire. In the short term, I am proposing to address four objectives related to my long-term objective. The first objective will use machine learning/artificial intelligence to identify and forecast severe fire weather episodes over western Canada. The second objective will address global changes in fuel moisture until the end of this century using multiple global climate models and multiple climate change scenarios. In particular, exceedances of key threshold fuel moisture values that determine ignition and active spread will be examined. The third objective will determine if there is a trend towards more high intensity fires during the night using infrared satellite data. The fourth objective will model how climate-change altered diurnal temperature and associated relative humidity changes will modify fuel moisture and how this will affect fire behaviour in the future. All these studies will contribute to enhance fire management today and in the future to better protect Canadians and their interests.