Historical and Future Prescribed Burn Windows for the Southeast United States

Prescribed burning is a critical tool for managing wildfire risks and meeting ecological objectives, but its safe and effective application requires that specific meteorological criteria are met. This dataset contains results from a study examining the potential impacts of projected climatic change on prescribed burning in the southeastern United States. A set of burn window criteria (suitable weather conditions within which burning may occur based on maximum daily temperature, daily average relative humidity, and daily average wind speed), were applied to projections from an ensemble of Global Climate Models (GCM) under two greenhouse gas emission scenarios, as well as past observations for comparison. Data are provided as decadal output for observed conditions, and for individual GCM results for the historical climate scenario and the two future climate scenarios are provided. In addition, summary statistics (e.g,. multi-model mean, and for selected quantiles) are provided for the GCM ensemble as a whole by decade.