Abstract
Global warming is expected to increase droughts and heatwaves, and consequently fire danger in southern Europe in the forthcoming decades. However, an assessment of the uncertainties associated with this general trend at regional scales, relevant to decision-making, is still missing. This study aims at assessing potential climate change impacts on fire danger over France through the projection of the widely used Fire Weather Index (FWI) and at quantifying the different sources of climate-driven uncertainty associated with these projections. We used daily climate experiments covering the 1995–2098 period under two scenarios (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5) provided by the EURO-CORDEX initiative. Our results show an overall increase in FWI throughout the century, with the largest absolute increases in the Mediterranean area. Model uncertainty was very high in western France, previously identified as a potential fire-prone region under future climate. In contrast, large increases in FWI in the Mediterranean area showed low uncertainty across models. Besides, analyzing the natural variability of FWI revealed that extreme years under present-day climate could become much more frequent by the end of the century. The FWI is projected to emerge from the background of natural variability by mid-twenty-first century with a summer elevated fire danger three times more likely when summer temperature anomaly exceeds + 2 °C.
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Acknowledgments
Acknowledgements are expressed to the French Ministry of Agriculture which funded the research activities. The authors are grateful to the modeling groups and the CORDEX projects for making the climate data available. They also thank Nathalie Bréda, Yvon Duché, Florent Mouillot, Mathieu Regimbeau, Samuel Somot, and Mathieu Vrac for their helpful inputs.
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JLD, HF, NM, and FP designed the study. HF conducted the analyses, produced figures, and wrote the first draft of the manuscript. NM and MDC helped on data processing. FP designed the uncertainty analysis. JR and RB contributed to discussing the results and participated in the writing of the text. All authors reviewed the paper.
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Fargeon, H., Pimont, F., Martin-StPaul, N. et al. Projections of fire danger under climate change over France: where do the greatest uncertainties lie?. Climatic Change 160, 479–493 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-019-02629-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-019-02629-w