Resolved wildfires — how good was the burn estimate?

Read the horizon before the error. Every fire graded here ended within about 9 days of the forecast being made, so these numbers say nothing about the 14-to-21 day range. A median error under a day is a statement about short-horizon calls only.

121 of 190 fire-days were discarded. NIFC publishes in batches, so a fire is recorded as gone at the next pull that omits it, not the day it actually stopped. Where that window is wider than a day and a half the end date is not known well enough to grade against, and the forecast is dropped rather than scored against a guess. Grading everything instead would report a -5.6 day bias that is an artifact of the publishing schedule, not the model.