4.2. Description of fire analysis and assessment areas

4.2 Description of fire analysis and assessment areas

· Impact of meteorology on fire behaviour (MET): This refers to the FA’s knowledge of weather understood as weather that has an impact on the speed of fire. This includes current and forecasted changes on fire behaviour and not only onsite meteorological variables.

· Fire position (POS): This refers to the knowledge that the FA owns when he/she has the capacity to track, draw or forecast perimeter movements to define the fire position and opportunities.

· Fire behaviour (BEH): This includes knowledge about fire intensity, rate of spread, spotting, crowning, etc.

· Fire spread patterns (PAT): This refers to the knowledge that the FA has about the movement of the fire. Moving a step forward from BEH, PAT involves tasks from defining types of fire (topographic, wind-driven, convection dominated) to identifying patterns. In this block, fire behaviour is considered not only from the perspective of point variables (temperature, humidity, etc.) but also including frontal analysis (study of the transition zone between air masses of different densities), convective cells or patterns.

For example, this knowledge can start from knowing the state of fuels (vegetation), linking this to specific behaviours to identify areas where fires have not yet occurred, but the state of the fuel is known and finally recognising the type of movement that fire can have.

This process can be done at different scales (fire scale or landscape scale), so here the knowledge about patterns not only considers fire flames during a specific day, but also fire regimes to finally propose scenarios that have impact on the landscape.

· Tactical Planning (TP)

The FA perfectly knows the way the organisation in which he/she is embedded works, including its limits and constrains, to be able to first identify opportunities and secondly to know in which order and priority the objectives are set by the IC. This whole block implies that the fire analyst has a minimum knowledge of manoeuvres and tactical deployment.

For example, FA is able to set indicators to detect when the situation deviates from the envisioned scenario and quickly communicate this to IC to share the awareness of the situation.

Other examples: safety protocols knowledge, situational awareness, direct observation from on-field (both on the surface and aerial), etc.