fireIndex {firebehavioR}

Fire weather indices based on static weather observations

Description

Methods to estimate fire weather indices using static weather observations.

Usage

fireIndex(temp, u, rh, fuel = 4.5, cure = 100)

Arguments

temp

a numeric vector of air temperatures (C)

u

a numeric vector of wind speeds (km/hr)

rh

a numeric vector of relative humidities (%)

fuel

a numeric vector of available fuel load (Mg/ha), defaults to 4.5

cure

a numeric vector for proportion of cured grass (%), defaults to 100

Details

This function computes seven methods to estimate static fire weather indices: the Angstrom Index, the Chandler Burning Index, the Hot Dry Windy Index, the Fuel Moisture Index, the Fosberg Fire Weather Index, the MacArthur Grassland Mark 4 Index, and the MacArthur Grassland Mark 5 Index. Each of these are static in that values are derived using a daily weather summary and do not consider weather during prior days. temp, rh and u are required for all methods. The latter two indices also use fuel, and the Grassland Mark 4 Index uses cure. Defaults for fuel and cure are provided, but can be specified by the user. Sharples (2009a, b) review all of the methods.

Value

a data frame of static fire weather index values

Author(s)

Justin P Ziegler, [e-mail]

References

Sharples, J.J., McRae, R.H.D., Weber, R.O. and Gill, A.M., 2009a. A simple index for assessing fuel moisture content. Environmental Modelling & Software, 24(5):637-646.
Sharples, J.J., McRae, R.H.D., Weber, R.O. and Gill, A.M., 2009b. A simple index for assessing fire danger rating. Environmental Modelling & Software. 24(6):764-774.

Examples

#Example using RAWS meteorological station data
data(rrRAWS)
rrRAWS.daily =   rrRAWS[format(strptime(rrRAWS$dateTime, "%m/%d/%Y %H:%M"), "%H:%M")=="14:35",]
fireIndex(temp=rrRAWS.daily$temp_c, u= rrRAWS.daily$windSpeed_kmh, rh = rrRAWS.daily$rh)