Probability distributions for holdover time of lightning-caused wildfires

Abstract

The holdover phase (i.e., the time between lightning-induced ignition and fire detection) is a phenomenon characteristic of lightning-caused wildfires. In this paper, we analyzed multiple holdover time datasets to determine the best statistical distribution for this phenomenon. We found that the gamma distribution seems a suitable candidate to model holdover times. We propose applications of the gamma distribution to improve the investigation of lightning-caused wildfires.