Circulation patterns, wildfire risk and wildfire occurrence at continental Spain

Rasilla, Domingo; García-Codron, Juan Carlos; Carracedo, Virginia; Diego, Concepción

doi:10.1016/j.pce.2009.09.003

Cited by 29 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…This fire–weather relationship is different from the one observed in most of the other Euro‐Mediterranean countries, where LFs have been generally associated to ‘blocking’ synoptic conditions, which promote warm surface conditions. This is the case in particular in the Iberian Peninsula (Pereira et al , ; Rasilla et al , ; Trigo et al , ; Cardil et al , ), in Italy (Cardil et al , ) and in eastern Mediterranean (Levin and Saaroni, ; Kassomenos, ; Papadopoulos et al , ). From a climatic point of view, this peculiar pattern can be explained by the latitude of Mediterranean France with a colder average summer climate than Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece and the out‐of‐phase relationship between daily averaged wind speed and temperature anomalies in this region (Spearman correlation, rho = −0.46, p < 0.001).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Daily synoptic conditions associated with large fire occurrence in Mediterranean France: evidence for a wind-driven fire regime

et al. 2016

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Changes in wildfire activity in the Mediterranean area over recent decades increase the need for a better understanding of the fire–weather relationships and for the development of reliable models to improve fire danger prediction. This study analyses daily synoptic and local weather conditions associated with the occurrence of summer large fires (LFs) in Mediterranean France during recent decades (1973–2013). The links between large fire occurrence and synoptic conditions are analysed with composites of sea level pressure and winds at 925 hPa and a parsimonious synoptic weather type (WT) classification based on these variables. A cluster analysis is used to identify five homogeneous regions with similar inter‐annual variations in fire activity. Our results reveal a dominant wind‐driven fire regime, i.e. wind conditions are the main factor explaining why fire become large, though substantial temporal and spatial variations are observed. Thus, most LFs occur under the ‘Atlantic Ridge’ WT that combines an anticyclonic ridge over eastern Atlantic and a cyclonic anomaly stretched from the North Sea to Central/Eastern Europe and Mediterranean basin. This pattern is significantly related at local scale to fast continental dry winds. By contrast, only few LFs occur under WTs characterized by anomalously warm local‐scale conditions (‘Blocking’), except under very warm and dry conditions such as during the outstanding 2003 summer. These results offer promising developments for the improvement of fire danger predictions and operational management.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Daily synoptic conditions associated with large fire occurrence in Mediterranean France: evidence for a wind-driven fire regime

et al. 2016

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“…Furthermore, this result is concordant with the defined regionalization defined by Rasilla et al . (), also with four sub‐regions, and presents a strong resemblance with the operative regionalization used by the Spanish authorities (MARN, ).…”

Section: Regionalizing Fire Regimes In the Ipmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, Rasilla et al . () did not use WTC from the COST733 catalogue, but rather his own classifications, based on Principal Components and Cluster analyses.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modelling wildfire activity in Iberia with different atmospheric circulation weather types

Trigo

Sousa

Pereira

et al. 2013

Intl Journal of Climatology

106

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This work focuses on the spatial and temporal variability of burnt area (BA) in the entire Iberian Peninsula (IP) and on the construction of statistical models to reproduce the inter‐annual variability. A novel common dataset was assembled for the whole IP by merging the registered BA from 66 administrative regions of both Portugal and Spain. We applied a cluster analysis to identify larger regions with similar fire regimes and results point to the existence of four clusters (Northwestern, Northern, Southwestern and Eastern) whose spatial patterns and seasonal fire regimes are shown to be related with constraining factors such as topography, vegetation cover and climate conditions. The relationship between BA at monthly time scale with both long‐term climatic pre‐conditions and short‐term synoptic forcing was assessed using correlation and regression analysis based on: (1) temperature and precipitation from 2 to 7 months in advance to fire peak season, (2) synoptic weather patterns derived from 11 distinct Weather Types Classifications (WTC). Different relations were obtained for each IP region with a relevant link being identified between BA and short‐term synoptic forcing for all clusters, while the relation with long‐term climatic preconditioning was relevant for all but one cluster. Stepwise regression models based on the best climatic and synoptic circulation predictors were developed with cross‐validation to avoid over fitting. The performance of the models varies within IP regions, though models exclusively based on WTC tend to better reproduce the annual BA time series than those merely based on pre‐conditioning climatic information. Nevertheless, the use of both synoptic and climatic predictors provides the best results, particularly for the two western clusters, with Pearson correlation coefficient values higher than 0.7. Finally, it is shown that typical synoptic configurations that favour high values of BA correspond to dry and warm wind flows associated with anti‐cyclonic regimes.

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“…A recent review on the role of natural disturbances in European forests from 1850 to 2000 reveals that fires are the second most important disturbance (after the storms) been responsible for 16% of total damage over the 1950-2000 period (Schelhaas et al, 2003). A combination of natural factors (vegetation stress, slopping topography, weather and climate), with a long history of human management practices of natural environments by means of fire, that favour anthropogenic ignitions in the Mediterranean countries, makes this region especially prone to the occurrence of a large number of fire events and to the onset of extreme fire episodes that determine per se the majority of the total amount of burnt area (hereafter, BA) in a whole fire season (Viegas et al, 1992;Pereira et al, 2005;Pyne, 2006;Benson et al, 2008;Rasilla et al, 2010;Amraoui et al, 2013). Therefore, it is not surprising that the largest numbers of f ires and burnt area in Europe are found in southern European countries, namely Portugal, Spain, France, Italy and Greece Schmuck et al, 2011;Amraoui et al, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Land cover fire proneness in Europe

2014

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Aim of study: The characterization of the fuels is an important aspect of the fire regime in each specific ecosystem while fire is an important disturbance for global vegetation dynamics. This study aims to identify and characterize the spatial and temporal evolution of the fire incidence and of the vegetation types that are most affected by forest fires in Europe, with emphasis on the mixed forests.Area of study: Europe. Material and methods:Corine Land Cover maps for 2000 and 2006 (CLC2000, CLC2006) and burned area (BA) perimeters, from 2000 to 2013 in Europe are combined to access the spatial and temporal evolution of the types of vegetation that are most affected by fires using geostatistics and Geographical Information System (GIS) techniques.Main results: The spatial and temporal distribution of BA perimeters, vegetation and burnt vegetation by fires was performed and different statistics were obtained for Mediterranean and northern Europe, confirming the usefulness of the used land cover classification. A fire proneness index (FPI) is proposed to assess the fire selectivity of land cover classes, to quantify and compare the propensity of vegetation classes and countries to fire.Research highlights: Mixed forests area is 5% of total European area but has increased 2.1% from 2000 to 2006, while other forest types followed an opposite trend. FPI for scrubs is twice (quadruple) of the value for the forests (agricultural areas) except during the occurrence of mega fire events, when the LCC of forest present higher FPI than the LCC of scrub.

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Circulation patterns, wildfire risk and wildfire occurrence at continental Spain

Cited by 29 publications

References 28 publications

Daily synoptic conditions associated with large fire occurrence in Mediterranean France: evidence for a wind-driven fire regime

Daily synoptic conditions associated with large fire occurrence in Mediterranean France: evidence for a wind-driven fire regime

Modelling wildfire activity in Iberia with different atmospheric circulation weather types

Land cover fire proneness in Europe

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