Abstract
Abstract. We present a procedure that allows the operational generation of daily forecasts of fire danger over Mediterranean Europe. The procedure combines historical information about radiative energy released by fire events with daily meteorological forecasts, as provided by the Satellite Application Facility for Land Surface Analysis (LSA SAF) and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). Fire danger is estimated based on daily probabilities of exceedance of daily energy released by fires occurring at the pixel level. Daily probability considers meteorological factors by means of the Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI) and is estimated using a daily model based on a generalized Pareto distribution. Five classes of fire danger are then associated with daily probability estimated by the daily model. The model is calibrated using 13 years of data (2004–2016) and validated against the period of January–September 2017. Results obtained show that about 72 % of events releasing daily energy above 10 000 GJ belong to the “extreme” class of fire danger, a considerably high fraction that is more than 1.5 times the values obtained when using the currently operational Fire Danger Forecast module of the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) or the Fire Risk Map (FRM) product disseminated by the LSA SAF. Besides assisting in wildfire management, the procedure is expected to help in decision making on prescribed burning within the framework of agricultural and forest management practices.
Highlights
Wildfires have been identified as the most important threat to forests in Mediterranean Europe (Requardt et al, 2009) that is regularly affected by large and destructive events
The proposed product consists of forecasts of fire danger over Mediterranean Europe based on a statistical procedure that combines information about fire history derived from the FRP product of LSA SAF with daily meteorological forecasts provided by European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF)
The procedure involves estimating static and daily probabilities of exceedance of daily energy released by fires occurring at the pixel level
Summary
Wildfires have been identified as the most important threat to forests in Mediterranean Europe (Requardt et al, 2009) that is regularly affected by large and destructive events. These weather-related hazards represent a serious problem to modern societies, with great negative impacts at social, economic and ecological levels and causing significant human casualties (Amraoui et al, 2015). Extreme weather conditions in summer (high temperature, strong wind, low relative humidity and drought) are a key factor in the ignition and spread of large wildfires (Amraoui et al, 2013; Pereira et al, 2013; Ruffault et al, 2016)
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