The extreme weather conditions behind the destructive fires of June and October 2017 in Portugal

Pinto, Miguel M.; Hurduc, Alexandra; DaCamara, Carlos C.; Trigo, Isabel F.; Trigo, Ricardo M.

doi:10.14195/978-989-26-16-506_13

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Additionally, since 2000 GJ is the typical daily amount of the energy released by a severe fire and very difficult to suppress (Pinto et al, 2018), this calibration analysis was performed in two steps -without considering any FRE threshold (FRE > 0 GJ) and considering an FRE severity threshold of 1500 GJ (FRE > 1500 GJ). The rationale is to identify the Mediterranean areas with the most severe wildfires.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Since FRP estimates the radiative power emitted by fire events, integrating it over the length of a fire event, an estimation of the total Fire Radiative Energy (FRE) emitted by each one can be computed. By definition, the daily FRE is the energy released by a fire at a given pixel, by the integration of the 15-minute FRP records, accordingly to Pinto et al (Pinto et al, 2018a(Pinto et al, , 2018b' formula:…”

Section: Fire Radiative Energymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…where k is the daily sequence of 15-minutes, FRPkp is the fire radiative power (in megawatts) in a given pixel p of image k, and the 0.9 factor converts the obtained result into gigajoules units (GJ). In addition, the FRE can be defined as the emitted radiant energy released during biomass combustion, being proportional to the total amount of biomass burned during a given fire (Pinto et al, 2018a(Pinto et al, , 2018b. The FRE values were computed for all the fire events that occurred over the period under study, as can be seen in Table1.…”

Section: Fire Radiative Energymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Mediterranean fire danger classes based on the Canadian Forest Fire Weather Index System, taking into account the Fire Radiative Power products from SEVIRI/MSG satellite

Silva¹,

Durão²,

Alonso³

et al. 2022

Advances in Forest Fire Research 2022

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Fire danger rating systems (FDRS) are widely used across the world for many purposes from planning for daily deployment of fire suppression resources to the evaluation of fire management strategies. FDRS can also be incorporated in different types of models and regions to assess the short and long-term effects of specific fire regimes and fire management policies. The Canadian Forest Fire Weather Index System (FWIS) is a widely known FDR system, being extensively applied for fire danger early warning in several regions around the world, namely over Europe. The FWIS includes a set of six sub-indices, based on meteorological data, to predict fire weather danger and fire behavior over regions under study. In order to have a reliable assessment of the fire danger based on the FWIS it is essential to define the most suitable threshold values for each danger class of the FWIS sub-indices over different regions. To establish those limit values for each class of the FWIS sub-indices, historical percentiles were computed for the period understudy, taking into account the occurred fire events (hotspots), despite the lack of information regarding fire events history and its relation to FWIS sub-indices. To accomplish the proposed validation, our approach is based on Fire Radiative Energy (FRE) released by each fire event that occurred in the Mediterranean region, over the study period. The FRE is computed from Fire Radiative Power (FRP) product as obtained from MSG/SEVIRI, generated and disseminated in near real-time by EUMETSAT in the framework of Land Surface Analysis Satellite Applications Facility (LSA SAF). Since FRP estimates the radiative power emitted by a given fire, it can be linked to local fuel burned amounts and be used as a proxy of fire intensity. By integrating FRP measures emitted during the lifetime of the fires that occurred over the regions under study, an estimate of the total FRE released can be easily obtained for each event. To obtain the FRE data for this work, it was considered the period of available FRP/SEVIRI data, from March 2010 to October 2021. Thresholds values of each defined danger class for the FWI, FFMC and ISI indices were calculated considering the total FRE hotspots registered, in agreement with the different fire regimes of the Mediterranean region. Since extreme wildfire patterns in Southern Mediterranean countries have been increasing over the last years, FRP/FRE products are a key tool to monitor and to improve fire managing activities, preparedness-including planning for deployment of fire suppression resources, over affected regions.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Fire Radiative Energymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Fire Radiative Energymentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Mediterranean fire danger classes based on the Canadian Forest Fire Weather Index System, taking into account the Fire Radiative Power products from SEVIRI/MSG satellite

Silva¹,

Durão²,

Alonso³

et al. 2022

Advances in Forest Fire Research 2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…While not making direct landfall in the Iberian Peninsula, Ophelia caused widespread impacts in the region, being one of the catalysers of the October 2017 Iberian wildfires that caused the loss of life of 49 people and close to a hundred injured people (Hatton, 2017;Castellnou et al, 2018;Pinto et al, 2018). It is, however, important to stress the compound nature of this event (Zscheischler et al, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Increasing Frequency of Tropical Cyclones in the Northeastern Atlantic Sector

et al. 2021

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North Atlantic Tropical Cyclones (TCs) are major atmospheric hazards that can cause large disruptions to coastal and near-coastal societies. Although most studies focus on those areas with highest impact (e.g., Caribbean Islands, the Gulf and western coast of United States), there is an increasing interest in characterizing changes in occurrence and impacts in areas usually less affected by TCs, particularly in the framework of a changing climate. Here we provide a long-term context evaluating changes in the frequency of TC in the Northeast Atlantic (NEA) basin during the 1978–2019 period. In the last decades, scattered information has shown an impact both from TCs and Post-Tropical Cyclones (PTC) in the NEA. We compute several complementary linear trends and show a significant (p ≤ 0.1) increase in the number of stronger storms in the entire North Atlantic basin, and the amount of TCs and PTCs that reach the NEA, in agreement with previous works. A highly significant relation (p ≤ 0.05) is found between the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) index and TC activity in both the entire North Atlantic and the NEA basin. Sea surface temperature anomaly maps are produced to better encapsulate the annual variability without the multidecadal oscillation effects and, important cold (warm) pools in cyclogenesis and development zones are found in years with low (high) TC activity. It is also found that the sea surface temperature field plays a minor role in the guiding of storms into the NEA sector. Long-term trends as well as high/low seasonal activity analysis suggest that atmospheric circulation (vertical wind shear, lapse rate, mean sea level pressure and upper-level steering) is more relevant than sea surface temperature in the NEA region.

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Enhancing the fire weather index with atmospheric instability information

Pinto

DaCamara

Hurduc

et al. 2020

Environ. Res. Lett.

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The Fire Weather Index (FWI) is widely used to assess the meteorological fire danger in several ecosystems worldwide. One shortcoming of the FWI is that only surface weather conditions are considered, despite the important role often played by atmospheric instability in the development of very large wildfires. In this work, we focus on the Iberian Peninsula for the period spanning 2004–2018. We show that atmospheric instability, assessed by the Continuous Haines Index (CHI), can be used to improve estimates of the probability of exceedance of energy released by fires. To achieve this, we consider a Generalized Pareto (GP) model and we show that by stepwisely introducing the FWI and then the CHI as covariates of the GP parameters, the model is improved at each stage. A comprehensive comparison of results using the GP with the FWI as a covariate and the GP with both the FWI and CHI as covariates allowed us to then define a correction to the FWI, dependent on the CHI, that we coined enhanced FWI (FWIe). Besides ensuring a better performance of this improved FWI version, it is important to stress that the proposed FWIe incorporates efficiently the effect of atmospheric instability into an estimation of fire weather danger and can be easily incorporated into existing systems.

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The extreme weather conditions behind the destructive fires of June and October 2017 in Portugal

Cited by 3 publications

References 6 publications

Mediterranean fire danger classes based on the Canadian Forest Fire Weather Index System, taking into account the Fire Radiative Power products from SEVIRI/MSG satellite

Mediterranean fire danger classes based on the Canadian Forest Fire Weather Index System, taking into account the Fire Radiative Power products from SEVIRI/MSG satellite

The Increasing Frequency of Tropical Cyclones in the Northeastern Atlantic Sector

Enhancing the fire weather index with atmospheric instability information

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