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Journal of the International Association of Wildland Fire
RESEARCH ARTICLE

Relating McArthur fire danger indices to remote sensing derived burned area across Australia

Sami Ullah Shah A B * , Marta Yebra A B , Albert I. J. M. Van Dijk A and Geoffrey J. Cary A
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations

A Fenner School of Environment & Society, College of Science, The Australian National University, ACT, Canberra, Australia.

B School of Engineering, College of Engineering and Computer Science, The Australian National University, ACT, Canberra, Australia.

* Correspondence to: sami.shah@anu.edu.au

International Journal of Wildland Fire 32(2) 133-148 https://doi.org/10.1071/WF21108
Submitted: 28 July 2021  Accepted: 21 October 2022   Published: 15 November 2022

© 2023 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing on behalf of IAWF.

Abstract

The McArthur grassland and forest fire danger indices, widely used in Australia, predict six fire danger classes from ‘Low-Moderate’ to ‘Catastrophic.’ These classes were linked to the rate of fire spread and difficulty of suppression. However, the lack of rate of fire spread data, especially for elevated fire danger classes, has hindered improvement of the McArthur methodology or an alternate approach. We explored the relationship between fire danger classes and burned areas (derived from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite instrument) within six climate zones during the 2000–2016 Australian fire seasons. A negative binomial linear regression model was used to explore this relationship. The fire danger classes demonstrated a corresponding increase in burned area from ‘Low-Moderate’ to ‘Very High’ classes in Australia’s inland regions. The elevated fire danger classes did not contribute to this trend. In coastal regions, the satellite-derived burned area showed no relationship between fire danger classes and satellite-derived burned area. We used accumulated burned area from the daily MODIS product, which could be subjected to lagged detection as observed in the Kilmore East fire. Thus, the satellite-derived total burned area may not be a suitable metric for informing the McArthur fire danger classes across Australia.

Keywords: Black Saturday fires, burned area, fire danger classes, fire danger index, forest fire danger index, grassland fire danger index, rate of fire spread, remote sensing.


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