CeaseFire: from scientific knowledge to operational tools for fire combat and management

Forest fires are a global phenomenon with severe and destructive impacts at the ecological, environmental, socio-economic and health levels. Portugal, like all Mediterranean Europe, is recurrently affected by large wildfires, particularly intensive during the summers of 2003, 2005 and 2017. The latter is remembered because of the 500 000 hectares of burned area and the at least 116 deaths in the fire season.

CeaseFire is a website that aims at converting the scientific knowledge produced at universities and research institutes into useful and user-friendly tools that provide information on fire activity and meteorological fire danger tailored to the needs of the fire community in Portugal and assist in decision making on fire management and combat and on fire damage mitigation. The website, relying on information from the LSA SAF project, provides maps and data of (1) components of the Fire Weather Index System;(2) Fire Radiative Power (FRP) released by wildfires (3) classes of meteorological fire danger, ignition potential and aftermath; (4) outlooks of the fire season severity; and (5) prescribed burned classes. The site has been sponsored by The Navigator Company, a leading force in the global pulp and paper market since the operational start of the website in 2016. The number of registered users has increased up to more than 1 600 within the fire community, comprising firemen, civil protection officers, municipalities, academic researchers and private owners. In recent years E-Redes, a national electricity distribution utility service, has also been supporting the development of the website.

CeaseFire is sufficiently flexible to include other tools and be implemented in other regions. In this context, the feedback provided by users and companies has been decisive to improve the tools and products, and extend the site to other geographical areas, namely the Zambezia province in Mozambique and, more recently, the Brazilian Pantanal.

Research work was funded by the Portuguese Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) I.P./MCTES through national funds (PIDDAC) IDL (UIDB/50019/2020), project FIRECAST (PCIF/GRF/0204/2017) and by EUMETSAT Satellite Application Facility on Land Surface Analysis (LSA SAF).