United States Geological Survey fire science: Fire danger monitoring and forecasting

Abstract

Each day, the U.S. Geological Survey produces 7-day forecasts for all Federal lands of the distributions of number of ignitions, number of fires above a given size, and conditional probabilities of fires growing larger than a specified size. The large fire probability map is an estimate of the likelihood that ignitions will become large fires. The large fire forecast map is a probability estimate of the number of fires on federal lands exceeding 100 acres in the forthcoming week. The ignition forecast map is a probability estimate of the number of fires on Federal land greater than 1 acre in the forthcoming week. The extreme event forecast is the probability estimate of the number of fires on Federal land that may exceed 5,000 acres in the forthcoming week.