FSim-Wildfire Risk Simulation

Quantitative wildfire risk analysis requires complete geospatial coverage of fire impact probabilities and sizes. Wildfire simulation is the primary means of estimating these, including the frequency distribution of large fire events. FSim simulates the growth and behavior of hundreds of thousands of fire events for risk analysis across large land areas using geospatial data on historical fire occurrence, weather, terrain, and fuel conditions. Effects of large fire suppression on fire duration and size are also simulated.

The FSim model has demonstrated that power-law wildfire size distributions are produced by the joint distributions of weather sequences and spatial locations of ignitions. There is no contagion among fires in FSim, thus the distributions of fire sizes are a product of the variability in the environment.

• FSim is used at national scale with relatively coarse resolutions (270m) and regional or local scales with relatively fine resolutions (e.g. 90m).
• The FSim event sets are used by the Reinsurance industry in their exposure calculations of wildfire risk.
• FSim generated outputs comprise the foundation for the national Wildfire Risk to Communities product (https://wildfirerisk.org/)

For more information, please see the FSim-Wildfire Risk Simulation Project webpage.

Principal Investigators: Mark Finney and Karen Short

FSim is period updated with improved algorithms and features. Download the FSim datasets from the links below.