7th Workshop on Forest Fire Management - EARSeL, European ...

34
I - PRE-FIRE PLANNING AND MANAGEMENT
ios. Most of them there were conducted at world level and some specific at
USA level. In Europe several studies have been conducted at country level
but no one considering the overall European Mediterranean region (EU-
Med) (Portugal, Spain, southern France, Italy and Greece). The goal of this
work is to use the results of statistical modelling of historical (1985-2004)
monthly burnt areas in EU-Med, as a function of monthly weather data and
derived fire danger indexes, and to analyse potential trends under present
and future climate conditions.
2 - Dataset
2.1 - EU fire statistic
The fire data were extracted from the European Forest Fire Information
System (EFFIS) EU fire database. This database is a collection of EU member
states of individual fire event records. For the five EU-Med countries the
complete available time window expands from 1985 until 2004. The fire
events are recorded at NUTS3 level (provinces) and aggregated at monthly
time frame.
2.2 - Weather dataset
Daily weather data, temperature, total precipitation, air relative humidity
and wind speed, were used to calculate Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI)
system components. The FWI system is a system of daily meteorologicalbased
indexes designed for the Canadian forest but amply used and tested
around the world, and also in EU. The success of this system is based on
his easy calculation but also in the presence of sub-indexes which summarize
the fuel moisture. It includes a litter moisture model (Fine Fuel
Moisture Code - FFMC), an upper organic moisture model (Duff Moisture
Code - DMC) and a deep organic or soil moisture model (Drought Code - DC).
These codes directly influence the fire behaviour expressed by four indexes
(Initial Spread Index - ISI, Build Up Index - BUI, Fire Weather Index - FWI,
Daily Severity Rating - DSR).
Meteorological variables were extracted from the European Centre for
Medium Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF) ERA-40 (40 Years Re-Analysis)
dataset to compute daily value of fire danger in Europe, with a resolution
of 1.25° for the period 1961 to 2002. The time series has been extended
until 2004 with data from the MARS archive of the same ECMWF. The ECMWF
dataset was manly divided in two time frames. The 1961-1990 was considered
as control period and the 1985-2004 was used to built up the statistical
model.
Instead, the future weather conditions were simulated by the regional climate
simulation model HIRHAM. The HIRHAM (Christensen et al., 1996) is