Projections of the Fire Weather Danger over Central Europe using EURO-CORDEX simulations

Increasing temperatures and harsher drought conditions in recent decades have enhanced the risk of wildfire in many regions across the globe. Recent fire activity in Central Europe raised concerns about the possible expansion of the fire weather danger conditions under climate change outside the present-day fire-prone regions, such as the Mediterranean Basin. Here, we employ the widely used Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI) system to assess the historical and future trends in the fire weather danger for Central Europe. Calculation of the originally proposed FWI requires utilizing noon-time temperature, relative humidity, wind, and accumulated precipitation. Using the ERA5 reanalysis dataset, we make sensitivity analyses with different combinations of alternative input data for noon-time meteorological parameters and estimate their biases.

This study uses an ensemble of regional climate models (RCM) from the EURO-CORDEX domain. We first compare the results from ERA5 with the RCM ensemble for the historical period. Then, we analyze future projections for Central Europe under different global warming levels (+2 K and +3 K). Results indicate that the fire-prone areas consistently increase under warmer climate conditions, including emerging fire-prone regions in Central and Northern Europe.