Empirical Evidence of Reduced Wildfire Ignition Risk in the Presence of Strong Winds

Anyone who has tried lighting a campfire on a windy day can appreciate how difficult it could be. However, despite real-life experience and despite laboratory experiments which have demonstrated that fire ignition risk dramatically decreases beyond a certain wind threshold, current fire weather indices (FWIs) do not take this effect into account and assume a monotonic relation between wind velocity and ignition risk. In this paper, we perform a global analysis which empirically quantifies the probability of ignition as a function of wind velocity. Using both traditional methods (a logistic regression and a generalized additive model) and machine learning techniques, we find that beyond a threshold of approximately 3–4 m/s, the ignition risk substantially decreases. The effect holds when accounting for additional factors such as temperature and relative humidity. We recommend updating FWIs to account for this issue.