The United States of America (US) has a long-standing history of fire management through the United States Forest Service. Despite this history of fire management, the US faces significant increases in fire potential across the 21st Century owing to future climate change and due to a legacy of past fuel management policies. Since the 1970s the US Forest Service (USFS) has operated a fire danger rating system, known as the National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS), which has aimed to portray, anticipate, and mitigate wildfires across the country. Fire danger ratings essentially aim to describe how dangerous a fire would be if it were to ignite and are used to inform not only the general public about wildfire risk but are also used by forest and fire managers to determine their actions in regards to fire suppression. The US Forest Service’s NFDRS currently produces 1-day forecasts of fire danger through the Wildland Fire Assessment System, and other state-focused outlets. The system quantifies common aspects of fire behaviour over wide spatial extents through a number of fire danger indices. These indices represent aspects of fire danger in terms of the likelihood of ignitions, rate of spread, potential heat release, and difficulty of control. Despite the NFDRS’s long-standing utility across the US, relatively few studies have sought to relate fire danger observations and forecasts to records of wildfire activity across its operational spatial extent. The majority of assessments of the NFDRS have been conducted at either single sites or on small spatial scales, despite it being a nation-wide system. This thesis analyses the NFDRS in respect to the occurrence of wildland fires and the final fire sizes they attain over an eight year period (2006-2013) through a number of analyses that; (i) examine the system’s ability to portray wildfire activity across the conterminous US; (ii) assess the NFDRS 1-day forecast’s accuracy; (iii) explore the impact of forecasting inaccuracy on wildfire activity across the conterminous US; and (iv) ascertain what outputs from the NFDRS relate most strongly to the formation of large wildfires. Firstly, this thesis shows that different regions of the US display different levels of correspondence between each observed fire danger indices and recorded fire activity. Areas in the Southern and Eastern Geographic Area Coordination Centers (GACCs) exhibit weaker correlations than those in the Northwest, Northern Rockies, Great Basin and Northern California GACCs. Peaks in fire occurrence are shown to occur at mid–low values of fire danger whereas final fire sizes increase monotonically with each fire danger index. Secondly, it is shown that the 1-day NFDRS forecasts have a strong correspondence with observed fire danger indices across the USA in the majority of locations. However, it is clear that there are multiple instances when these 1-day forecasts either over- or under-predict fire danger conditions, where there is systematic over-prediction of low-end fire danger values and under-prediction of high-end fire danger values. These predictive errors likely stem from errors in forecasted fire weather conditions, the subsequent derived fuel state and the reporting time of daily observations. Thirdly, when the inaccuracy of these forecasts was assessed spatially and temporally, the regions with the highest percentage of inaccurate forecasts were found to be in the Northern Rockies and Great Basin Geographic Area Coordination Centers (GACCs). Over-prediction was found to mainly occur between February and May, whilst peaks in the under-prediction of fire danger were found to be in spring and late summer. Finally, large wildfires appear to occur when fire danger indices are highly variable throughout the lifetime of a fire. As such this highlights the importance of considering daily variations in specific fire danger indices and that current understanding of variable fire danger conditions does not allow for the near-term prediction of large wildfire potential.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Montana, 2006. / Title from title screen. Description based on contents viewed Mar. 30, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 142-151).

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Nevada, Reno, 2006. / "May, 2006." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 33-35). Online version available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.E.F.E.)--Iniversity of Canterbury, 2004. / Typescript (photocopy). "October 2004." Includes bibliographical references. Also available via the World Wide Web.

No description available.

Thesis (M.S.)--Mississippi State University. Department of Geosciences. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

"The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate and enhance the technical basis of the procedure for evaluating lifesafety within the Building Firesafety Engineering Method (BFSEM). A framework for the analysis has been documented, but not extensively tested in a building situation. Hence, procedures to obtain the necessary input data and to evaluate that data needed to be developed. In addition, the general framework had to be tested rigorously enough to identify weaknesses. "

Fire plays an important role in forest ecosystem management depending on the dual character of it. It should be managed and supervised effectively. In this particular study, the study area was located in the north part of Gävleborg County in Sweden, which is in a high- latitude region. Seven factors, divided into natural factors and human caused factors, were extracted from digital elevation model (DEM), classified land use map and feature shape files provided by National Land Survey of Sweden (Lantmäteriet). Two different weighting schemes for the factors were determined by the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method. With the help of ArcGIS 9.3 and Erdas 9.3, two classified result maps were obtained, where forest fire risk ranks were shown as five classes, very low, low, moderate, high and very high. The 43 fire incidents in the year 2007 and 2008 recorded by Global Fire Management System were used to evaluate the results. The results show that the higher rank the region is, the larger is the probability for forest fire risk and higher the risk to spread the fire. Furthermore, according to the occurrence time of the fire incidents, the period of time from end of May to beginning of June was generalized as a dangerous period for forest fire risk in this study area. After analyzing and discussing, even if there might be some uncertainties caused by variable selection, resolution problem and weighting schemes, the results were generally reliable.

Knowledge of fire risk is crucial for manufacturers and regulators to make correct choices in prescribing fire protection systems, especially flame retardants. Methods of determining fire risk are bogged down by a multitude of confounding factors, such as population demographics and overlapping fire protection systems. Teasing out the impacts of one particular choice or regulatory change in such an environment is crucial. Teasing out such detail requires statistical techniques, and knowledge of the field is important for verifying potential methods. Comparing the fire problems between two states might be one way to identify successful approaches to fire safety. California, a state with progressive fire prevention policies, is compared to Texas using logistic regression modeling to account for various common factors such as percentage of rural population and percentage of population in ‘risky’ age brackets. Results indicate that living room fires, fires in which the first item ignited is a flammable liquid, piping, or filter, and fires started by cigarettes, pipes, and cigars have significantly higher odds of resulting in a casualty or fatality than fires started by other areas of origin, items first ignited, or heat sources. Additionally, fires in Texas have roughly 1.5 times higher odds of resulting in casualties than fires in California for certain areas of origin, items first ignited, and heat sources. Methods of estimating fire losses are also examined. The potential of using Ramachandran’s power-law relationship to estimate fire losses in residential home fires in Texas is examined, and determined to be viable but not discriminating. CFAST is likewise explored as a means to model fire losses. Initial results are inconclusive, but Monte Carlo simulation of home geometries might render the approach viable. / text

Thesis (M. App. Sc.)--Carleton University. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 228-236). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.