Contemporary Wildfire Hazard Across New Jersey
In March 2022, Pyrologix was contracted by Timmons Group and the New Jersey Forest Fire Service to conduct a wildfire hazard assessment for the state of New Jersey. This project is part of the New Jersey Wildfire Hazard Assessment Project (NJHAZ). This effort involved three primary tasks: calibrating and updating the fuelscape, producing measures of burn probability and simulated fire perimeters, and conducting wildfire intensity modeling with measures of integrated wildfire hazard.
We leveraged an existing fuelscape, developed for the Eastern Region Wildfire Risk Assessment, as a starting point for the NJHAZ project. In that effort, feedback on fuel mapping from fuel and fire behavior specialists across the Eastern Region, including New Jersey, was implemented to calibrate the fuelscape to produce expected fire behavior results. To customize that fuelscape for the New Jersey-specific hazard assessment, we held a fuel review workshop and modified the fuelscape according to the feedback received.
