Monitoring and forecasting droughts, forest fires and heat waves – Clim4Cast project overview and its implementation in Slovenian drought monitoring system

Natural disasters - especially droughts, forest fires, and heatwaves - are already having a serious impact on the environment, society, and the economy. According to climate change projections, their frequency, duration, and severity are expected to increase in Central Europe. Therefore, it is crucial to develop tools that can effectively monitor and forecast these types of events. The Clim4Cast project, supported by the Interreg CE program, aims to develop an integrated approach for addressing droughts, heatwaves, and fire weather conditions, which usually occur consequently or simultaneously. These are referred to in the project terminology as combined "DHF" (Drought–Heat–Fire) events. The objectives of the Clim4Cast project are not only to develop tools for monitoring and forecasting DHF event but also to establish a comprehensive DHF event database containing records of their occurrence, duration, spatial extent, and associated damage. In addition, the project proposes actions to improve emergency response, raise public awareness, and strengthen resilience to future DHF events in the participating countries.
This paper presents the first results of implementing the Clim4Cast monitoring and forecasting tool in Slovenia. The tool is based on the SoilClim model developed by the Global Change Research Institute. The SoilClim model utilizes initial and boundary conditions from ECMWF (re)analyses and forecasts to assess drought and fire weather conditions using an improved representation of soil properties. The soil moisture anomalies and drought intensity analyses and forecasts (up to 9 days ahead) were compared with drought classes derived from the Slovenian national drought monitoring system. The operational drought monitoring system currently relies on ground-based meteorological observations, which limits its ability to capture the complex dynamics of soil moisture. By including these parameters, the Clim4Cast approach provides a more comprehensive assessment of drought risk as well as its imminent changes. The drought categories from both sources were also compared with remote sensing-based products to gain further insight into the impacts on vegetation. The results and findings from this comparison will be presented and discussed.