Adaptation of the Canadian Fire Weather Index to Mediterranean forests

The Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI) is one of the most used tools to forecast forest fire hazard. In this paper, we propose an adaptation of the FWI to take into account the Mediterranean vegetation and climate, to improve FWI performances for areas with these characteristics. In particular, the F...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Natural hazards (Dordrecht) 2015-01, Vol.75 (2), p.1795-1810
Main Authors: Chelli, Stefano, Maponi, Pierluigi, Campetella, Giandiego, Monteverde, Paolo, Foglia, Monica, Paris, Eleonora, Lolis, Andreas, Panagopoulos, Thomas
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adaptation
Civil Engineering
Climatology
Earth and Environmental Science
Earth Sciences
Environmental Management
Fire hazards
Fires
Forest & brush fires
Forest fires
Forests
Fuels
Geophysics/Geodesy
Geotechnical Engineering & Applied Earth Sciences
Hazards
Hydrogeology
Moisture content
Natural Hazards
Original Paper
Weather
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Summary:The Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI) is one of the most used tools to forecast forest fire hazard. In this paper, we propose an adaptation of the FWI to take into account the Mediterranean vegetation and climate, to improve FWI performances for areas with these characteristics. In particular, the FWI has been calibrated for two Mediterranean regions (Algarve, Portugal and Peloponnese, Greece) by fitting the experimental data, collected in the field, for the forest fuel moisture content, with the values expected by the application of the original Canadian FWI. Field data were collected during the 2010 and 2011 fire seasons. The satisfactory results obtained by the adaptation of parameters from the original FWI, in spite of the small sample areas and limited time of collection, allowed us to verify the usefulness of the method in describing the fuel moisture dynamics and obtaining indexes closer to the characteristics of the Mediterranean forests considered. The adapted FWI, if further tested and extended to other sample areas, may help in a more detailed and precise application of the FWI index by improving the daily forest fire hazard forecast, to become also a better support for the Civil Protection Agency of Mediterranean countries.
ISSN:0921-030X
1573-0840
DOI:10.1007/s11069-014-1397-8