Forest fire danger projections in the Mediterranean using ENSEMBLES regional climate change scenarios

J Bedia,S Herrera,J M Gutiérrez,A Camia,J M Moreno

doi:10.1007/s10584-013-1005-z

Abstract

We present future fire danger scenarios for the countries bordering the Mediterranean areas of Europe and north Africa building on a multi-model ensemble of state-of-the-art regional climate projections from the EU-funded project ENSEMBLES. Fire danger is estimated using the Canadian Forest Fire Weather Index (FWI) System and a related set of indices. To overcome some of the limitations of ENSEMBLES data for their application on the FWI System—recently highlighted in a previous study by Herrera et al. (Clim Chang 118:827–840, 2013)—we used an optimal proxy variable combination. A robust assessment of future fire danger projections is undertaken by disentangling the climate change signal from the uncertainty derived from the multi-model ensemble, unveiling a positive signal of fire danger potential over large areas of the Mediterranean. The increase in the fire danger signal is accentuated towards the latest part of the transient period, thus pointing to an elevated fire potential in the region with time. The fire-climate links under present and future conditions are further discussed building upon observed climate data and burned area records along a representative climatic gradient within the study region.

Highlights

Wildfires are events highly dependent on meteorological drivers (Krawchuk et al, 2009), so much so that global fire activity can be simulated with a handful of climate variables (Pechony and Shindell, 2010)
Our results indicate that proxy version C3 was the best proxy to actual Fire Weather Index (FWI), outperforming C2, the former being positively biased and the latter negatively with respect to actual FWI
Overall results show that C3 is the best proxy in order to give realistic estimates of fire danger scenarios using the ENSEMBLES Regional Climate Models (RCMs) in current climate, and a realistic estimation of the climate change signal

Summary

Introduction

Wildfires are events highly dependent on meteorological drivers (Krawchuk et al, 2009), so much so that global fire activity can be simulated with a handful of climate variables (Pechony and Shindell, 2010). These meteorological variables are commonly used to build fire danger indices, which are applied to characterize and anticipate potentially dangerous conditions (e.g. Stocks et al, 1998; Williams et al, 2001). The state-of-the-art regional climate change scenarios for Europe were produced in the EU-funded ENSEMBLES project (van der Linden and Mitchell, 2009), building on the IPCC-AR4 Global Climate Models (GCMs) and based on the principal Regional Climate Models (RCMs) developed in Europe, to produce for the first time multi-model scenarios at a 25km resolution for the SRES-A1B scenario (see van der Linden and Mitchell, 2009, for an overview)

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Conclusion