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| Titel |
Assessing the predictability of fire occurrence and area burned across phytoclimatic regions in Spain |
| VerfasserIn |
J. Bedia, S. Herrera, J. M. Gutiérrez |
| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| ISSN |
1561-8633
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| Digitales Dokument |
URL |
| Erschienen |
In: Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences ; 14, no. 1 ; Nr. 14, no. 1 (2014-01-07), S.53-66 |
| Datensatznummer |
250118230
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| Publikation (Nr.) |
 copernicus.org/nhess-14-53-2014.pdf |
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| Zusammenfassung |
Most fire protection agencies throughout the world have developed forest fire
risk forecast systems, usually building upon existing fire danger indices and
meteorological forecast data. In this context, the daily predictability of
wildfires is of utmost importance in order to allow the fire protection
agencies to issue timely fire hazard alerts. In this study, we address the
predictability of daily fire occurrence using the components of the Canadian
Fire Weather Index (FWI) System and related variables calculated from the
latest ECMWF (European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts) reanalysis,
ERA-Interim. We develop daily fire occurrence models in peninsular
Spain for the period 1990–2008 and, considering different minimum burned area
thresholds for fire definition, assess their ability to reproduce the
inter-annual fire frequency variability. We based the analysis on a
phytoclimatic classification aiming the stratification of the territory into
homogeneous units in terms of climatic and fuel type characteristics,
allowing to test model performance under different climate/fuel conditions.
We then extend the analysis in order to assess the predictability of monthly
burned areas. The sensitivity of the models to the level of spatial
aggregation of the data is also evaluated. Additionally, we investigate the
gain in model performance with the inclusion of socioeconomic and land
use/land cover (LULC) covariates in model formulation.
Fire occurrence models have attained good performance in most of the phytoclimatic
zones considered, being able to faithfully reproduce the inter-annual
variability of fire frequency. Total area burned has exhibited some
dependence on the meteorological drivers, although model performance was poor
in most cases. We identified temperature and some FWI system components as
the most important explanatory variables, highlighting the adequacy of the
FWI system for fire occurrence prediction in the study area. The results were
improved when using aggregated data across regions compared to when data were
sampled at the grid-box level. The inclusion of socioeconomic and LULC
covariates contributed marginally to the improvement of the models, and in
most cases attained no relevant contribution to total explained variance –
excepting northern Spain, where anthropogenic factors are known to be the
major driver of fires. Models of monthly fire counts performed better in
the case of fires larger than 0.1 ha, and for the rest of the thresholds (1, 10
and 100 ha) the daily occurrence models improved the predicted inter-annual
variability, indicating the added value of daily models.
Fire frequency predictions may provide a preferable basis for past fire
history reconstruction, long-term monitoring and the assessment of future
climate impacts on fire regimes across regions, posing several advantages
over burned area as a response variable. Our results leave the door open to
the development a more complex modelling framework based on daily data from
numerical climate model outputs based on the FWI system. |
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