Publication: Impact of climate variability on summer fires in a Mediterranean environment (northeastern Iberian Peninsula)
Authors
Turco, Marco ; Llasat, Maria-Carmen ; Hardenberg, Jost von ; Provenzale, Antonello
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Publisher
Springer
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DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-012-0505-6
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info:eu-repo/semantics/article
Description
Ā©2013. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
This document is the Accepted version of a Published Work that appeared in final form in Climatic Change. To access the final edited and published work see https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-012-0505-6
Abstract
We analyse the impact of climate interannual variability on summer
forest fires in Catalonia (northeastern Iberian Peninsula). The study period covers
25 years, from 1983 to 2007. During this period more than 16000 fire events were
recorded and the total burned area was more than 240 kha, i.e. around 7.5% of
whole Catalonia. We show that the interannual variability of summer fires is significantly correlated with summer precipitation and summer maximum temperature.
In addition, fires are significantly related to antecedent climate conditions, showing positive correlation with lagged precipitation and negative correlation with
lagged temperatures, both with a time lag of two years, and negative correlation
with the minimum temperature in the spring of the same year. The interaction
between antecedent climate conditions and fire variability highlights the importance of climate not only in regulating fuel flammability, but also fuel structure.
On the basis of these results, we discuss a simple regression model that explains
up to 76% of the variance of the Burned Area and up to 91% of the variance of
the number of fires. This simple regression model produces reliable out-of-sample
predictions of the impact of climate variability on summer forest fires and it could
be used to estimate fire response to diāµerent climate change scenarios, assuming
that climate-vegetation-humans-fire interactions will not change completely.
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Citation
Climatic Change (2013) 116:665ā678
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