Assessing the performance of various fire weather indices for wildfire occurrence in Northern Switzerland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. Fire weather indices are widely used to understand and assess meteorological fire hazard. However, in complex regions such as Switzerland with mountainous and hilly terrain, it is difficult to select an appropriate index. In this study, we validate the performance of 14 fire weather indices, four meteorological variables, and a logistic regression model to predict wildfire occurrence for different ecoregions in the canton of Bern in Northern Switzerland with respect to historical fire records from 1981 to 2020. We find that the performance of the indices varies seasonally and regionally. The spring season (March–May) shows that the Canadian Fine Fuel Moisture Content and other indices that respond readily to weather changes perform best. In summer (June–August) and autumn (September–November), the Canadian Buildup Index and Drought Code – indices that describe persistent hot and dry conditions – perform best. Overall, seasonal differences in performance are larger than inter-regional differences. Finally, we show that a logistic regression model trained on local historical fire activity can outperform existing fire weather indices and can be used for medium-range weather forecasting or climate change studies, using only daily averages of meteorological variables as input.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".