A European Initiative on Wildfire Risk and Atmospheric Impacts

A new wildfire regime is emerging in Southern Europe, characterised by larger and more intense fires, and by a fire season that now extends beyond the traditional summer months. In this region, climate projections indicate that fire occurrence and severity will increase faster than the global average due to an increased risk of heatwaves and droughts, as well as the evolution of biodiversity towards more resilient and less fire-prone plant species. These changes in wildfire regimes reveal significant gaps in the tools and technologies needed for implementing comprehensive fire management approaches. The community still faces challenges in predicting which wildfires may escalate into extreme events, and the environmental, climate and health impacts of such events remain poorly understood.

The Southern Europe Biomass BURNing (EUBURN) programme emerged as a concerted response to the need to improve the prevention, monitoring and prediction of wildfire risks in southern Europe. EUBURN integrates a series of multi-year and multi-scale field campaigns, lab studies, satellite remote sensing, and advanced modeling to build the research foundations for understanding the complex interactions between wildfires and the atmosphere. Based on this fundamental research, the EUBURN programme aims to support fire responders, ecosystems and air quality management, while addressing specific climate research requirements by developing new or enhanced operational products, tools and services for monitoring and predicting wildfires and their atmospheric impacts.

The first field campaign SILEX (Smoke from European Wildfire Experiment) of the EUBURN programme took place in southern France from 15 July to 3 August 2025. It had three specific objectives: (i) characterising the interactions between fuel, fire, gases, aerosols, radiation and clouds; (ii) contributing to the development of numerical prediction tools for fire behaviour and atmospheric plume dynamics; and (iii) assessing the uncertainties, biases and limitations of fire and smoke products from ground-based and satellite remote sensing. Ten scientific flights were carried out with the ATR-42 research aircraft equipped with state-of-the-art remote-sensing and in situ instruments to characterise wildfires occurring in southern France, as well as their associated smoke plumes, from the onset of emissions to their regional transport. The main purpose of the presentation is to familiarize the broader scientific community with the EUBURN programme and the SILEX dataset it produced. New findings on fire characteristics, gas and aerosol emissions, physical and chemical aging and cloud condensation nuclei will be emphasized.