Speaker
Description
Studying climate change impacts on wildfires has become key in recent decades, as climate linked extreme wildfire events have been occurring more often across southern Europe. Employing atmosphere-fire modelling frameworks that combine landscape characterization of fuels connected to atmospheric feedbacks, allows us to determine how certain weather conditions can affect a wildfire progression in a given location. In this study we employed the coupled atmosphere-fire numerical model WRF-SFIRE, in a phased approach to landscape management under future climate scenarios. The initial phase methodology used the Fire Weather Index (FWI) to determine high fire danger danger, assuming a worst-case scenario. This experiment used 13 fuel descriptors native to the United States, NFFL fuel models. In the current phase, the gap between NFFL and Portuguese fuel models was bridged, validating them across 4 different wildfires and comparing them to satellite based observations. Results provided improvements in burnt area and rate of spread estimates, less biased in the Portuguese fuel models. Simulated to satellite comparison estimates of fire energy release from fire showed an overestimation in both cases.
| Which topic best fits your talk? | Climate and Environment |
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| Affiliations | University of Aveiro, Department of Physics, CESAM |