Climate drivers of global wildfire burned area
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Grillakis, Manolis
Voulgarakis, Apostolos
Rovithakis, Anastasios
Seiradakis, Konstantinos D
Koutroulis, Aristeidis
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
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.
Date Issued
2022-04-01
Date Acceptance
2022-03-21
Citation
Environmental Research Letters, 2022, 17 (4), pp.1-10
ISSN
1748-9326
Publisher
Institute of Physics (IoP)
Start Page
1
End Page
10
Journal / Book Title
Environmental Research Letters
Volume
17
Issue
4
Copyright Statement
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
License URL
Sponsor
Leverhulme Trust
The Leverhulme Trust
Identifier
http://gateway.webofknowledge.com/gateway/Gateway.cgi?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=PARTNER_APP&SrcAuth=LinksAMR&KeyUT=WOS:000777013000001&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=ALL_WOS&UsrCustomerID=1ba7043ffcc86c417c072aa74d649202
Grant Number
RC-2018-023
Subjects
Science & Technology
Life Sciences & Biomedicine
Physical Sciences
Environmental Sciences
Meteorology & Atmospheric Sciences
Environmental Sciences & Ecology
fire weather index
burned area
climate sensitivity
WEATHER INDEX SYSTEM
WILDLAND FIRES
CARBON
VEGETATION
EMISSIONS
PATTERNS
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
ARTN 045021
Date Publish Online
2022-04-01