Climate drivers of global wildfire burned area

Bibliographic Data

ID15549030
AuthorsManolis Grillakis (0000-0002-4228-1803, Imperial College London, corresponding author), Apostolos Voulgarakis (0000-0002-6656-4437, Imperial College London), Anastasios Rovithakis (0000-0001-6072-5298, Imperial College London), Konstantinos Seiradakis (0009-0009-3267-7474, Imperial College London), Konstantinos D Seiradakis, Aristeidis Koutroulis (0000-0002-2999-7575, Technical University of Crete), Robert D Field (0000-0003-3001-5580, Goddard Institute for Space Studies), Matthew Kasoar (0000-0001-5571-8843, Imperial College London), Αθανάσιος Παπαδόπουλος (0000-0002-4546-8729, Technical University of Crete), Athanasios Papadopoulos, Mihalis Lazaridis (0000-0001-5877-4023, Technical University of Crete)
Year2022
Volume17
Issue4
Pages045021-045021
Publication date2022-03-22
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironmental Research Letters (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1748-9326 • E-ISSN: 1748-9326
PublisherIOP Publishing (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1088/1748-9326/ac5fa1
OpenAlexW4220970733
LanguageEN
References cited67

Wildfire is an integral part of the Earth system, but at the same time it can pose serious threats to human society and to certain types of terrestrial ecosystems. Meteorological conditions are a key driver of wildfire activity and extent, which led to the emergence of the use of fire danger indices that depend solely on weather conditions. The Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI) is a widely used fire danger index of this kind. Here, we evaluate how well the FWI, its components, and the climate variables from which it is derived, correlate with observation-based burned area (BA) for a variety of world regions. We use a novel technique, according to which monthly BA are grouped by size for each Global Fire Emissions Database (GFED) pyrographic region. We find strong correlations of BA anomalies with the FWI anomalies, as well as with the underlying deviations from their climatologies for the four climate variables from which FWI is estimated, namely, temperature, relative humidity, precipitation, and wind. We quantify the relative sensitivity of the observed BA to each of the four climate variables, finding that this relationship strongly depends on the pyrographic region and land type. Our results indicate that the BA anomalies strongly correlate with FWI anomalies at a GFED region scale, compared to the strength of the correlation with individual climate variables. Additionally, among the individual climate variables that comprise the FWI, relative humidity and temperature are the most influential factors that affect the observed BA. Our results support the use of the composite fire danger index FWI, as well as its sub-indices, the Build-Up Index (BUI) and the Initial Spread Index (ISI), comparing to single climate variables, since they are found to correlate better with the observed forest or non-forest BA, for the most regions across the globe

Atmospheric sciences · Climate change · Climatology · Geography · Meteorology · Physical geography · Precipitation · Relative humidity · Environmental Science · Fire dynamics and safety research · Fire effects on ecosystems · Plant Water Relations and Carbon Dynamics · Geology

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access