Comparative study of various methods of fire danger evaluation in southern Europe

Five methods for the evaluation of fire danger, based on meteorological factors, were tested using statistical data for daily number of fires and burned area from six different regions in France, Italy and Portugal, for a period of 3-9 years, both for Winter and Summer fires. A normalised scale for the output of the various methods was adopted to compare the variation of number of fires and burned area predicted by each method. Based on a statistical test, the relative performance of the various methods is assessed. From the five methods that were analysed in this research, the Canadian and the modified Nesterov methods showed the best overall performance.