Hourly Forest Fire Danger Index for historical conditions

The McArthur Forest Fire Danger Index (FFDI) is a fire weather potential index that describes how current weather conditions and recent precipitation patterns support fire potential in forested areas. FFDI calculations are based on McArthur (1967) and are dependent on air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, and the drought factor. The metric was calibrated against the 1939 "Black Friday" bushfires in Victoria—the worst event at the time—which corresponds to a value of 100.

This dataset provides hourly time series of FFDI 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. A coastal correction is applied to mixed land–sea grid cells to ensure FFDI values are 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.