NBIC-ACS Stage 2 Forest Fire Danger Index - projected scenario, 20% and 10% annual exceedance probabilities

McArthur Forest Fire Danger Index (FFDI) is a fire weather potential index that describes how current weather conditions and recent precipitation patterns could support a fire in forested areas. FFDI calculations are based on McArthur, A.G. (1967) and dependent on air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and drought factor. FFDI was originally implemented as a circular slide rule that constrained the returned index between 0 and 100, where 100 was representative of the worst Australian bushfire at that time, Victoria 1939. The data provided here is unbounded.
Here we provide predicted upper-bound FFDI values across the Australian landscape, defined for a set of annual exceedance probabilities modelled using extreme values analysis on more than 43 years of hourly data.
The FFDI potential rasters represent reasonable worst case extreme conditions. Specifically, the rasters represent the FFDI potential for given AEPs of 20%, 10%, 5%, 2% and 1%. These FFDI AEPs are based on the projected weather timeseries developed by NBIC using the historical regional weather reanalysis dataset BARRA-R2 [1], and CMIP6-CCAM Regional Climate Models (RCM) [2].
The Regional Climate Models (RCM) considered are:
• ACCESS ESM 1.5
• EC-Earth 3
• CMCC ESM2
• CNRM ESM 2.1
• NCAR CESM2
• NorESM2 MM
The future climate change scenarios considered are:
• Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) SSP 1-26: Sustainability
• SSP 3-70: Regional Rivalry
• SSP 3-70: Regional Rivalry, using wind speed from the baseline scenario
The combination of RCMs and future climate change scenarios results in a suite of 18 projected FFDI potential datasets.