A critical assessment of the Burning Index in Los Angeles County, California
Frederic P. Schoenberg A E , Chien-Hsun Chang A , Jon E. Keeley B C , Jamie Pompa A , James Woods D and Haiyong Xu AA Department of Statistics, 8142 Math-Science Building, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
B United States Geological Survey, Western Ecological Research Center, Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Parks, Three Rivers, CA 93271, USA.
C Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
D Department of Geography, California State University, Long Beach, CA 90840, USA.
E Corresponding author. Email: frederic@stat.ucla.edu
International Journal of Wildland Fire 16(4) 473-483 https://doi.org/10.1071/WF05089
Published: 20 August 2007
Abstract
The Burning Index (BI) is commonly used as a predictor of wildfire activity. An examination of data on the BI and wildfires in Los Angeles County, California, from January 1976 to December 2000 reveals that although the BI is positively associated with wildfire occurrence, its predictive value is quite limited. Wind speed alone has a higher correlation with burn area than BI, for instance, and a simple alternative point process model using wind speed, relative humidity, precipitation and temperature well outperforms the BI in terms of predictive power. The BI is generally far too high in winter and too low in fall, and may exaggerate the impact of individual variables such as wind speed or temperature during times when other variables, such as precipitation or relative humidity, render the environment ill suited for wildfires.
Additional keywords: burn area, model evaluation, point process, wildfire, wind.
Acknowledgements
Our sincerest gratitude to Larry Bradshaw at the USDA Forest Service for so generously providing us with the weather station data and helping us process it and generate the corresponding BI values. We also thank Roger Peng who provided valuable help and advice, as well as members of the Los Angeles County Fire Department and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works (especially Mike Takeshita, Herb Spitzer and Frank Vidales) for sharing their data and expertise.
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