Impact of wildfire-induced land cover modification on local meteorology: A sensitivity study of the 2003 wildfires in Portugal

Abstract

Wildfires alter land cover creating changes in dynamic, vegetative, radiative, thermal and hydrological properties of the surface. However, how so drastic changes induced by wildfires and how the age of the burnt scar affect the small and meso-scale atmospheric boundary layer dynamics are largely unknown. These questions are relevant for process analysis, meteorological and air quality forecast but also for regional climate analysis. Such questions are addressed numerically in this study on the case of the Portugal wildfires in 2003 as a testbed. In order to study the effects of burnt scars, an ensemble of numerical simulations using the Weather Research and Forecasting modeling system (WRF) have been performed with different surface properties mimicking the surface state immediately after the fire, few days after the fire and few months after the fire. In order to investigate such issue in a seamless approach, the same modelling framework has been used with various horizontal resolutions of the model grid and land use, ranging from 3.5km, which can be considered as the typical resolution of state-of-the art regional numerical weather prediction models to 14km which is now the typical target resolution of regional climate models.The study shows that the combination of high surface heat fluxes over the burnt area, large differential heating with respect to the preserved surroundings and lower surface roughness produces very intense frontogenesis with vertical velocity reaching few meters per second. This powerful meso-scale circulation can pump more humid air from the surroundings not impacted by the wildfire and produce more cloudiness over the burnt area. The influence of soil temperature immediately after the wildfire ceases is mainly seen at night as the boundary-layer remains unstably stratified and lasts only few days. So the intensity of the induced meso-scale circulation decreases with time, even though it remains until full recovery of the vegetation. Finally all these effects are simulated whatever the land cover and model resolution and there are thus robust processes in both regional climate simulations and process studies or short-time forecast. However, the impact of burnt scars on the precipitation signal remains very uncertain, especially because low precipitation is at stake.