Increasing Awareness and Preparedness for Extreme Fire Weather and Behavior

Oral Presentation 

Recent destructive fire seasons around the world indicate the emergence of novel fire regimes, 
characterized by high-intensity burning and extreme fire behaviour. While the contribution of 
individual factors can be debated, the scientific literature concludes that fire weather is one 
prominent driver of fire activity. Moreover, there is growing evidence that climate change is 
escalating the frequency, severity and extend of wildfires around the world. Simply put, wildfires are 
changing because we change the conditions in which they occur. Although the importance of 
weather to wildfire activity has been documented since the 1930s, there is still a lot of research 
effort in advancing our knowledge on the drivers and the processes that lead to the development of 
extreme fire weather and behaviour. Here we provide an overview of our results within the frame of 
the FLAME project. We present the relationship between fire weather extremes and burned areas in 
Europe and Greece, as well as the synoptic scale drivers of fire weather and their associated 
climatology and trends. Furthermore, to support more effective fire management by providing 
valuable information to practitioners days in advance, we illustrate an alternative medium-range 
forecasting framework of fire weather that could be used for predicting the potential for extreme 
fire behaviour. By compiling a database of past extreme wildfires we also analyze the key 
atmospheric processes that contributed to the development of extreme fire behaviour and we 
showcase the added value of high resolution numerical simulations. Finally, we present an advanced 
coupled fire-atmosphere modelling system able to simulate fire spread and behaviour in near-real 
time.

Acknowledgments
This work has been supported financially by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation 
(H.F.R.I.) under the "2nd Call for H.F.R.I. Research Projects to support Post-Doctoral Researchers" 
(Project Number: 00559, Project Acronym: FLAME).