Seasonal McArthur Forest Fire Danger Index (FFDI) data for Australia: 1973-2017
Description
McArthur FFDI for historical data at 39 high quality stations in Australia. Stations cover the entire continent, although spacing is sparse in some locations. Values of 95th,90th,75th,50th,25th and 10th percentile of daily FFDI estimated over standard meteorological seasons (i.e. DJF, MAM, JJA, SON). Top and Bottom value for each season are also provided. Reliable data presented here extend from JJA 1972 through MAM 2017. The data used in the paper focus on the 90th percentile. Seasonal statistics for components of FFDI (i.e. rainfall, KBDI, max temperature, relative humidity, drought factor, wind speed) also given. Latitude/longitude of the stations, number of individual observations in each season, and time indicators also provided. Sorry, station names not included...couldn't get the netCDF to contain a string variable!! The netCDF-3 file describes the format and variables included in more detail. The calculation of FFDI follows the methodology described in Lucas (2010). Station selection is as in Clarke et al (2013). Underlying meteorological data come from Bureau of Meteorology surface weather stations This version of the data set supports the submission/publication of Harris and Lucas (2019) in PLOS ONE
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Steps to reproduce
1. Acquire historical records of weather data from BoM 2. Follow methodology described in Lucas (2010) -- to get exact reproduction, averaging periods, etc used in calculation must match exactly -- other periods will get you close, but not exactly the same 3. Tabulate seasonal statistics 4. Identify wind change points (see Lucas (2010)) 5. Apply homogeneity corrections for wind