Fire Danger on Jambi Peatland Indonesia based on Weather Research and Forecasting Model

Abstract

Monitoring drought related to peat fire danger is becoming essentials due to the adverse impacts of peat fires. However, the current monitoring is mostly based on station data and has not yet covered all parts of peatlands. This research was carried out to initiate a spatial monitoring for peat fire, particularly in Jambi province. Our approach was simple by integrating Weather Research Forecasting (WRF) output with a drought-fire model. This research aims to: (i) calibrate rainfall, air temperature and soil moisture data from WRF output; and (ii) analyze temporal drought related to fire danger. A drought-fire model known as Peat Fire Vulnerability Index was applied with daily inputs of WRF output at 5km resolution, which were comprised of rainfall, air temperature, and soil moisture. The results showed that calibration reduced rainfall magnitude, and slightly increased the maximum air temperature and soil moisture. The calibration performance was good as shown by a very low percent bias (less than ±5%), and lower error (RMSE=16.5; MAE=9.5). Our analysis showed that drought triggered by El Niño in 2015 had escalated extreme fire danger class by 38% compared to normal year (2018). This has been confirmed by a low variation of proportion of extreme class during July-August 2015. The results suggested that integrating spatial global climate data will benefit to the improved drought-fire model by providing spatial data. The results are expected to be a reference on drought and peat fires mitigation action.

The Impact of Rewetting Peatland on Fire Hazard in Riau, Indonesia

“…WRF has widely been applied in fire research by providing weather input data of drought-fire models, such as in Australia [20], Poland [21], and the United States [22]. In Indonesia, the applicability of the WRF of fire assessment has been initiated recently in Sumatra peatlands [23,24].…”

A Preliminary Study on the Parameter Configuration of Weather Research Forecasting in Tropical Peatland, Central Kalimantan

“…Efforts have been proposed to mitigate the drought associated fires such as through the establishment of Indonesian peatland agency, which is specifically tasked to restore degraded peatland. Researches also contribute to deal with the drought associated fires by integration of weather research and forecasting model into drought-fire indices (Groot et al, 2006;Lisnawati et al, 2022;Taufik et al, 2023) to mitigate the fire risk.…”

“…Weather research and forecasting (WRF) model is a state-of-the art of numerical weather prediction that has been widely tested and applied worldwide to study the atmospheric condition. Now its application is not limited to operational weather forecasting only, but expands to weather impact studies such as flood forecast (Patel et al, 2019;Zhou et al, 2018), susceptible to landslide events (Nuryanto et al, 2020), and forest fires prediction (Lisnawati et al, 2022;Shamsaei et al, 2023;Taufik et al, 2023).…”

Analysis of Carbon Dioxide Emission from Forest Fires based on Fire Radiative Power in Riau

“…Notably, peatland fires present a more intricate challenge in terms of containment due to their capability to propagate not only through aboveground biomass but also penetrate subsurface peat layers (Lisnawati et al, 2022). Riau province has obtained a special awareness as frequent fires occurred especially from peatland ecosystem (Taufik et al, 2023), although restoration efforts were initiated since 2016.…”