Meteorological and Terrain Data Sources for Optimizations of Wildfire Analyses in Bulgaria
摘要
Wildfires in Bulgaria are increasing risk due to rapid growth of human activities in non urban areas and frequent periods of dry and extremely hot weather conditions over the last three decades. Terrain and meteorological data for detailed wildfire analyses is in most cases available only in paper reports from the respective authorities. Grass, shrub or forest types categorised in fuel models are not developed as a concept in GIS or any other formats for Bulgaria. Our paper is focused on the available Bulgarian data sources for wildfire analyses or simulation purposes, such as topography, fuel load, forestry inventory maps, and meteorological inputs. We describe explicitly the free data sources or data available as a result of national or EU-funded projects. The new comprehensive database developed by the National Geoinformation Center in Bulgaria was used for optimizations and better high-resolution analyses as free data source. We step on EU funded project FirEUrisk for generating 100 m. resolution fuel map for Bulgaria. Free meteorological data is obtained from METER.AC platform. Optimization on data accuracy was performed for the wind speed and wind direction with WindNinja free tool. In the discussion we suggest possible future improvements of the simulated outcomes by using recently developed more precise DEM/DSM models that are available for the Bulgarian territory.