The impact of climate change on forest fire danger rating in China’s boreal forest

Abstract

The Great Xing’an Mountains boreal forests were focused on in the northeastern China. The simulated future climate scenarios of IPCC SRES A2a and B2a for both the baseline period of 1961–1990 and the future scenario periods were downscaled by the Delta Method and the Weather Generator to produce daily weather data. After the verification with local weather and fire data, the Canadian Forest Fire Weather Index System was used to assess the forest fire weather situation under climate change in the study region. An increasing trend of fire weather severity was found over the 21st century in the study region under the both future climate change scenarios, compared to the 1961–1990 baseline period. The annual mean/maximum fire weather index was predicted to rise continuously during 2010–2099, and by the end of the 21st century it is predicted to rise by 22%–52% across much of China’s boreal forest. The significant increases were predicted in the spring from of April to June and in the summer from July to August. In the summer, the fire weather index was predicted to be higher than the current index by as much as 148% by the end of the 21st century. Under the scenarios of SRES A2a and B2a, both the chance of extremely high fire danger occurrence and the number of days of extremely high fire danger occurrence was predicted to increase in the study region. It is anticipated that the number of extremely high fire danger days would increase from 44 days in 1980s to 53–75 days by the end of the 21st century.