Assessing meteorological fire danger over Europe based on a statistical model of satellite-derived fire radiative power

Abstract

The Satellite Application Facility for Land Surface Analysis (LSA SAF), that is part of EUMETSAT’s ground segment, operationally disseminates daily forecasts of meteorological fire danger over Mediterranean Europe. The so-called Fire Risk Map (FRM) product relies on estimates of the probability of exceedance of predefined thresholds of daily released energy by active fires as derived from a Generalized Pareto model that uses FWI as covariate for the scale parameter; FWI, the Fire Weather Index (FWI), is part of the Canadian Fire Weather Index System and has proven to be very suitable to rate fire danger over Europe. The aim of this study is to extend the procedure to Northern and Central Europe making use of a statistical model of Fire Radiative Power (FRP) as derived from MODIS observations over Europe covering the period 2000-2022. Following the approach developed by DaCamara et al. (2023), the statistical model consists of an 8 parameter, doubly truncated lognormal body distribution with generalized Pareto tails, using FWI as a covariate of its parameters. First, Europe is divided into eight regions according to the recorded number of hotspots and to the averaged FRP over the study period. Each one of those regions is then stratified into three subregions according to the dominant land cover type, i.e., forest, shrub, or agriculture. For each of the subregions, a statistical model is fitted to the sample of historical records of FRP together with the associated sample of FWI values obtained from the Copernicus Emergency Management Service. The fitted models are then applied to Europe to generate monthly climatological values of probability of exceedance of prescribed thresholds of FRP. This information is used to define appropriate limits for classes of fire danger (i.e. low, moderate, high, very high and extreme) for each subregion of Europe. Finally, these classes are validated by analyzing the distribution of recorded FRP among the classes and by examining maps for extreme fire events.   This work was supported by EUMETSAT Satellite Application Facility on Land Surface Analysis (LSA SAF) and by Instituto Dom Luiz (IDL), a research unit financed with national funds (PIDDAC) by FCT (UIDB/50019/2020).