Daily Canadian Forest Fire Weather Index for historical conditions

The Canadian Forest Fire Weather Index (FWI) is a fire weather potential index that describes how current weather conditions and recent precipitation patterns support a landscape fire. FWI calculations are based on Van Wagner & Pickett (1985) and Van Wagner (1987), and are dependent on air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, and precipitation. While the metric was calibrated to a value of 200 for the worst conditions possible in Canada, values above 200 are regularly reported in Australia. This metric was also originally developed for boreal forests, although was later generalised to different climate and vegetation.

This dataset provides daily time series of FWI values across the Australian landscape from January 1979 to July 2022. Calculations are based on the Bureau of Meteorology’s BARRA-R2 historical weather reanalysis (Su et al., 2022), using concurrent hourly weather conditions at approximately 11 km spatial resolution. Following the Van Wagner & Pickett (1985) formulation, weather conditions at 12:00 PM are used as the representative daily values. A coastal correction is applied to ensure that mixed land–sea grid cells report values representative of land-based conditions.

This dataset is research-grade and is provided solely for scientific and academic research purposes. It is not intended for operational, commercial, or decision-making use.