Hourly Grass Fire Danger Index for historical conditions

The Grass Fire Danger Index (GFDI) is a fire weather potential index describing how current weather and recent precipitation patterns support fire potential in grassy areas. GFDI calculations are based on McArthur (1966, 1973) and depend on air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, and grass curing. The metric was developed with the worst event considered corresponding to a value of 100.

This dataset provides hourly time series of GFDI values across the Australian landscape from January 1979 to July 2022. Calculations are derived from 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. Grass curing values are derived from a time-series analysis of the Bureau of Meteorology’s MODIS-based MapVictoria grass curing dataset (2000–2019). Given the limited temporal overlap between curing and weather data, two versions of the GFDI time series were calculated using either the monthly average or the 99th percentile of curing conditions for each location. A coastal correction is applied to ensure that mixed land–sea grid cells report GFDI 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.