Validation of ERA5 fire weather conditions in Greece between 2007 and 2019: A preliminary analysis

Abstract

Accurate simulations of fire weather conditions for both the past and the future are of great importance for fire management and preparedness. With the advancement of numerical weather prediction models and data assimilation techniques, more accurate reanalysis products have been developed the recent years. Here we validate fire weather conditions in Greece which are computed based on ERA5 reanalysis data using surface observations from the automatic weather station network of the National Observatory of Athens (NOA). We assess the fire weather conditions in an application of the Canadian Forest Fire Weather Index (FWI) System in both datasets. Although, ERA5 FWI archive is available since 1979 here we limit our analysis during the period of 2007 to 2019, due to the limited data availability from the NOA network. The validation of FWI in ERA5 data shows good agreement with the NOA observations with a mean correlation of 0.87. Furthermore, FWI in ERA5 data is overall slightly underestimated compared to NOA observations, which is driven by an underestimation of the three moisture components of FWI, namely the Fine Fuel Moisture Code (FFMC), the Drought Code (DC) and the Duff Moisture Code (DMC). Preliminary results also indicate that the largest errors are found over the eastern and southern parts of Greece, which is the are that experiences the highest FWI values during the summer.