The rainfall factor in lightning-ignited wildfires in Catalonia

Pineda, Nicolau; Rigo, Tomeu

doi:10.1016/j.agrformet.2017.03.016

Cited by 45 publications

(56 citation statements)

References 78 publications

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“…2). Lightning fires are rare events mostly occurring in remote areas in midland and southwestern Catalonia (Pineda & Rigo, 2017). The vast majority of fires are caused by humans and ignite near the urban areas and roads (Gonzalez‐Olabarria, Brotons, Gritten, Tudela, & Teres, 2012; González‐Olabarria, Mola‐Yudego, & Coll, 2015).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Geospatial Modeling of Containment Probability for Escaped Wildfires in a Mediterranean Region

et al. 2020

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Despite escalating expenditures in firefighting, extreme fire events continue to pose a major threat to ecosystem services and human communities in Mediterranean areas. Developing a safe and effective fire response is paramount to efficiently restrict fire spread, reduce negative effects to natural values, prevent residential housing losses, and avoid causalties. Though current fire policies in most countries demand full suppression, few studies have attempted to identify the strategic locations where firefighting efforts would likely contain catastrophic fire events. The success in containing those fires that escape initial attack is determined by diverse structural factors such as ground accessibility, airborne support, barriers to surface fire spread, and vegetation impedance. In this study, we predicted the success in fire containment across Catalonia (northeastern Spain) using a model generated with random forest from detailed geospatial data and a set of 73 fire perimeters for the period 2008-2016. The model attained a high predictive performance (AUC = 0.88), and the results were provided at fine resolution (25 m) for the entire study area (32,108 km 2). The highest success rates were found in agricultural plains along the nonburnable barriers such as major road corridors and largest rivers. Low levels of containment likelihood were predicted for dense forest lands and steep-relief mountainous areas. The results can assist in suppression resource pre-positioning and extended attack decision making, but also in strategic fuels management oriented at creating defensive locations and fragmenting the landscape in operational firefighting areas. Our modeling workflow and methods may serve as a baseline to generate locally adapted models in fire-prone areas elsewhere.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Geospatial Modeling of Containment Probability for Escaped Wildfires in a Mediterranean Region

et al. 2020

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“…We use the land cover map from 2015 produced by the European Space Agency (ESA) Climate Change Initiative (CCI) from the PROBA-Vegetation (PROBA-V) and Sentinel-3 OLCI (S3 OLCI) time series to classify lightning flashes over coniferous and mixed forests. This classification of lightning flashes ensures that only lightning flashes occurring over areas with vegetation that can be ignited are included in our analysis, as most of forest fires are due to the ignition of conifers or shrublands during the summer season (Pineda and Rigo, 2017). This map has a temporal resolution of one year and a horizontal resolution of 300 m. We consider that a lightning flash is taking place over coniferous or mixed forests if there is at least one 300 m × 300 m grid cell with conifer or mixed trees 10 km around the flash position.…”

Section: Meteorological Data and Satellite Measurementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, LIW are one of the most important precursors of the largest forest fires during the summer (Vázquez and Moreno, 1998;Badia et al, 2002;Amatulli et al, 2007;García-Ortega et al, 2011;Oliveira et al, 2012;San-Miguel-Ayanz et al, 2013;Ganteaume et al, 2013;San José et al, 2014). Contrary to fires with anthropological origin, LIW usually occur in remote areas and under extreme meteorological conditions that hinder the extinction work (Pineda et al, 2014;Pineda and Rigo, 2017). The important role of lightning in initiating the largest forest fires over the Mediterranean basin highlights the need to develop novel forecasting methods.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The ignition (fire triggering), survival (smoldering) and arrival (flaming combustion) of LIW (Anderson, 2002) is closely related with intense drought periods and high temperatures (Pineda and Rigo, 2017). The amount of precipitation at surface 2 https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-2021-125 Preprint.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(Colson, 1960;Hall, 2007) and the type of vegetation (Pineda et al, 2014;Gora et al, 2017;Baranovskiy and Yankovich, 2018) play a key role in the ignition of wildfires. Most of LIW occur in forest with conifer vegetation (Krawchuk et al, 2006;Reineking et al, 2010;Müller et al, 2013;Pineda and Rigo, 2017;Moris et al, 2020), where dry thunderstorms and strong winds favor the ignition, survival and arrival of fire (Rorig et al, 2007;Pineda and Rigo, 2017). The definition of dry thunderstorm is not homogeneous in the literature.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Lightning-ignited wildfires and long-continuing-current lightning in the Mediterranean Basin: Preferential meteorological conditions

Pérez‐Invernón¹,

Huntrieser²,

Soler³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Abstract. Lightning is the major cause of natural ignition of wildfires worldwide and produces the largest wildfires in some regions. Lightning strokes produce about 5 % of forest fires in the Mediterranean basin and are one of the most important precursors of the largest forest fires during the summer. Lightning-ignited wildfires produce significant emissions of aerosols, black carbon and trace gases, such as CO, SO2, CH4 and O3, affecting air quality. Characterization of the meteorological and cloud conditions of lightning-ignited wildfires in the Mediterranean basin can serve to improve fire forecasting models and to upgrade the implementation of fire emissions in atmospheric models. This study investigates the meteorological and cloud conditions of Lightning-Ignited Wildfires (LIW) and Long-Continuing-Current (LCC) lightning flashes in the Iberian Peninsula and Greece. LCC lightning and lightning in dry thunderstorms with low precipitation rate have been proposed to be the main precursors of the largest wildfires. We use lightning data provided by the World Wide Lightning Location Network (WWLLN), the Earth Network Total Lightning Network (ENTLN) and the Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) onboard the International Space Station (ISS) together with four databases of wildfires produced in Spain, Portugal, Southern France and Greece, respectively, in order to produce a climatology of LIW and LCC lightning over the Mediterranean basin. In addition, we use meteorological data provided by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) ERA5-reanalysis data set and by the Spanish State Meteorological Agency (AEMET) together with the Cloud Top Height (CTH) product derived from Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) satellites measurements to investigate the meteorological conditions of LIW and LCC lightning. According to our results, LIW and a significant amount of LCC lightning flashes tend to occur in dry thunderstorms with weak updrafts. Our results suggest that lightning-ignited wildfires tend to occur in high-based clouds with a vertical content of moisture lower than the climatological value, as well as with a higher temperature and a lower precipitation rate. Meteorological conditions of LIW from the Iberian Peninsula and Greece are in agreement, although some differences possibly caused by highly variable topography in Greece and a more humid environment are observed. These results show the possibility of using the typical meteorological and cloud conditions of LCC lightning flashes as proxy to parameterize the ignition of wildfires in atmospheric or forecasting models.

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