Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
The primary purpose of the Global EWS-Fire Project is to develop a globally
consistent suite of fi re danger and early warning products to support international
collaboration and reduce wildfi re disaster. As part of this process, fi re danger and
early warning information will be made widely available to all countries through
open access. As well, the Global EWS-Fire Project actively supports projects to
assist countries with limited fi re management capacity in the local use and applica-
tion of fi re danger and early warning information. The Global EWS-Fire was offi -
cially launched and made publicly available in May 2011, and system development
is ongoing as new products are being designed.
The Global EWS-Fire is a project of the Global Observation of Forest Cover and
Global Observation of Landcover Dynamics (GOFC-GOLD) Fire Implementation
Team, which is comprised of numerous international wildland fi re, remote sensing,
and weather agency representatives. The Global EWS-Fire is actually a system of
fi re danger modeling systems. All early warning products will be accessible at the
home directory of the GOFC-GOLD Fire IT website.
4
Additional and more detailed
information can be found at other system websites hosted by the Global Fire
Monitoring Centre,
5
the European Forest Fire Information System,
6
the Desert
Research Institute,
7
and the Canadian Forest Service.
8
7.3.3
Global System Structure
As stated earlier, the purpose of the Global EWS-Fire is to link the wide range of
uniquely calibrated, national fi re danger rating systems currently in operation, with
a single set of fi re danger indices that have globally consistent calibration. These
global indices allow weather-based comparisons of fi re danger across national bor-
ders and continents over a spectrum of time scales. They are provided as a supple-
ment to national systems and serve to support large-scale bilateral fi re management
decisions such as suppression resource-sharing and resource mobilization in
advance of disaster conditions, similar to the centralized decision-making of
national fi re management agencies with nationally calibrated systems. For the many
countries in the world that do not have the internal capacity to develop a national fi re
danger rating system, the Global EWS-Fire provides an operational fi re danger rat-
ing system that can be calibrated to regional conditions.
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