Towards the operational implementation of the Fire Weather Index FWI based on the High-Resolution WRF Model

Wildfires represent an important issue in Argentina and their management strongly depends on the possibility of having all the resources ready to be used at the right time. To this purpose, the availability of fire danger indices becomes essential. In previous work, the authors implemented the Australian index FFDI (Forest Fire Danger Index) for the Southern Cone, based on a weather forecast model at 16 km of spatial resolution. In the present paper we present the design of a platform for the generation of a fire danger forecast, based on the Canadian index FWI (Fire Weather Index), which is the one used by the Federal System of Wildfire Management of Argentina. Through this platform, FWI is automatically estimated based on the weather forecast of 24 and 48 hs of the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF), run at 4 km spatial resolution for the central region of Argentina. Data of temperature, wind, air relative humidity and rainfall of the previous 24 hs are necessary to calculate FWI. Even though the system is in an experimental phase, preliminary results show good ability of our FWI product to identify areas with higher probability of wildfires. The system will include a component of visualization, automatically exporting raster outputs to web pages (PNG format) and webgis servers (Geotiff format) available at the institutions involved in this project, where the product will be available to download.