Improving decision processes and the informational basis upon which decisions are made in pursuit of safer and more effective fire response have become key priorities of the fire research community. One area of emphasis is bridging the gap between fire researchers and managers through development of application-focused, operationally relevant decision support tools. In this paper we focus on a family of such tools designed to characterise the difficulty of suppression operations by weighing suppression challenges against suppression opportunities. These tools integrate potential fire behaviour, vegetation cover types, topography, road and trail networks, existing fuel breaks and fireline production potential to map the operational effort necessary for fire suppression. We include case studies from two large fires in the USA and Spain to demonstrate model updates and improvements intended to better capture extreme fire behaviour and present results demonstrating successful fire containment where suppression difficulty index (SDI) values were low and containment only after a moderation of fire weather where SDI values were high. A basic aim of this work is reducing the uncertainty and increasing the efficiency of suppression operations through assessment of landscape conditions and incorporation of expert knowledge into planning.

中文翻译：

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建模抑制难度：当前和未来的应用

改进决策过程和决策的信息基础，以追求更安全、更有效的火灾响应，已成为火灾研究界的关键优先事项。重点领域之一是通过开发以应用为中心的、与操作相关的决策支持工具来弥合火灾研究人员和管理人员之间的差距。在本文中，我们关注一系列此类工具，旨在通过权衡压制挑战与压制机会来表征压制行动的难度。这些工具整合了潜在的火灾行为、植被覆盖类型、地形、道路和小径网络、现有燃料中断和火线生产潜力，以绘制灭火所需的操作努力。我们包括来自美国和西班牙的两场大火的案例研究，以展示旨在更好地捕捉极端火灾行为的模型更新和改进，并展示了成功控制火灾的结果，其中抑制难度指数 (SDI) 值较低，并且仅在适度控制SDI 值较高的火灾天气。这项工作的一个基本目标是通过评估景观条件和将专家知识纳入规划来减少不确定性并提高抑制行动的效率。