An Integrated System for the Forest Fire Dynamics Hazard Assessment Over a Wide Area

An integrated approach is presented for the assessment of forest fire hazard over a wide geographical area on the basis of real-time information, meteorological forecasts, and territorial data stored in a geographical information system. The paper describes the architecture of a comprehensive system that can be designed in order to manage the overall forest fire risk. Specifically, vegetation modelling, in connection with local meteorological conditions and topography, allows obtaining forecast of the dynamics of moisture contents of the different kinds of dead and live fuels over a wide geographical area. Besides, a semi-physical fire propagation model gives a quantitative evolution of the hazardousness over the whole considered region. Such hazardousness is related to the spread behaviour of a potential fire after an accidental or deliberate ignition. A dynamic hazard assessment is carried out, as hazard distribution in time and space and is determined over a certain time horizon (24/72 hours). The purpose of dynamic hazard assessment is that of getting reliable information useful to take a number and a variety of pre-operational actions that can reduce the impact of potentially lighted fire over the considered territory, within the considered time horizon. An application of the system is described over the whole Italian territory relevant to the Joint Operation Center of the Italian Civil Protection, in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.