Annual Burn Probability

Annual Burn Probability represents the likelihood of a wildfire of any intensity occurring at a given location (pixel) in a single fire season. In a complete assessment of wildfire hazard, wildfire occurrence and spread are simulated in order to characterize how temporal variability in weather and spatial variability in fuel, topography, and ignition density influence wildfire likelihood across a landscape. In such cases, the hazard assessment includes modeling of burn probability, which quantifies the likelihood that a wildfire will burn a given point (a single grid cell or pixel) during a specified period of time. Burn probability for fire management planning applications in this case is reported on an annual basis - the probability of burning during a single fire season.

Data and Resources

Additional Info

Field Value
Last Updated January 17, 2025, 06:42 (UTC)
Created January 17, 2025, 06:42 (UTC)
category /Fire Dynamics/Functional Fire
collection_name California Landscape Metrics
creation_method Annual Burn Probability was produced by Pyrologix LLC, a wildfire threat assessment research firm, as part of a spatial wildfire hazard assessment across all land ownerships for the state of California. The ongoing work generally follows the framework outlined in Scott and Thompson (2013), with custom methods and significant improvements developed by Pyrologix. The project generally consists of three components: fuelscape calibration and updates, wildfire hazard assessment, and risk assessment. It utilizes a combination of wildfire models and custom tools, including the FSim large wildfire simulator (Finney et al., 2011). To date, this work has resulted in a wide variety of spatial data layers related to wildfire hazard and risk, including Annual Burn Probability, representing conditions prior to the 2020, 2021 and 2022 fire seasons. Work to date has been funded by the USDA Forest Service Region 5, the California Energy Commission, and the USDI Bureau of Land Management with data contributions from CAL FIRE. For this project, the USFS modeling system called FSim is used to quantify annual wildfire likelihood across California. The model is parameterized using spatial datasets of historical weather, fire occurrence, fuels, weather, and topography in order to simulate thousands of fire-years on a landscape. Annual Burn Probability is calculated from these simulations using a Monte Carlo approach to make a spatially resolved estimate of the contemporary annual likelihood of wildfire across the landscape. For more information on FSim or the wildfire hazard modeling being performed by Pyrologix, please see Volger et al., 2021.
data_units Probability, 0 to 1
data_vintage 12/2022. Includes disturbances through the end of 2022
encoding utf8
file_name AnnualBurnProbability_202212_202406_T1_v5
format GeoTiff
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harvest_source_id a2637971-af12-457f-ae4a-831d2202a539
harvest_source_title WIFIRE Commons
maximum_value 0.1
metric_definition_and_relevance Annual Burn Probability represents the likelihood of a wildfire of any intensity occurring at a given location (pixel) in a single fire season. In a complete assessment of wildfire hazard, wildfire occurrence and spread are simulated in order to characterize how temporal variability in weather and spatial variability in fuel, topography, and ignition density influence wildfire likelihood across a landscape. In such cases, the hazard assessment includes modeling of burn probability, which quantifies the likelihood that a wildfire will burn a given point (a single grid cell or pixel) during a specified period of time. Burn probability for fire management planning applications in this case is reported on an annual basis - the probability of burning during a single fire season.
minimum_value 0.0
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tier 1