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Impact of climate variability on summer fires in a Mediterranean environment (northeastern Iberian Peninsula)

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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 different climate change scenarios, assuming that climate-vegetation-humans-fire interactions will not change significantly.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by esTcena project (Exp. 200800050084078), a strategic action from Plan Nacional de I+D+i 2008-2011 funded by Spanish Ministry of Medio Ambiente y Medio Rural y Marino. The authors thank AEMET and UC for the data provided for this work (Spain02 gridded precipitation data set) and the Forest Fire Prevention Service of “Generalitat de Catalunya” (SPIF) for the fire data. Special thanks to Xavier Castro, Antoni Tudela and Esteve Canyameras from SPIF for the helpful discussions on the matter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Barcelona, Av. Diagonal 647, Barcelona, 08028, Spain

    Marco Turco & Maria Carmen Llasat

  2. CMCC (Euro Mediterranean Centre for Climate Change), Impact on soil and coast Division, Via Augusto Imperatore 16, 73100, Lecce, Italy

    Marco Turco

  3. ISAC-CNR, Corso Fiume 4, 10133, Torino, Italy

    Jost von Hardenberg & Antonello Provenzale

Authors
  1. Marco Turco
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  2. Maria Carmen Llasat
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  3. Jost von Hardenberg
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  4. Antonello Provenzale
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Correspondence to Marco Turco.

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Turco, M., Llasat, M.C., von Hardenberg, J. et al. Impact of climate variability on summer fires in a Mediterranean environment (northeastern Iberian Peninsula). Climatic Change 116, 665–678 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-012-0505-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-012-0505-6

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