Operationalizing Coupled Fire-Atmosphere Forecasting at National Scale: Insights from the EUBURN Programme and SILEX Campaign

Europe is entering new wildfire regimes, with more frequent extreme events capable of generating strong fire–atmosphere interactions and, in some cases, their own local weather. These events expose important gaps in current early-warning, monitoring, and operational support systems, especially when rapid decisions are needed to characterize fire behaviour and organize targeted observations. To address these scientific and operational challenges, we developed the Southern Europe Biomass Burning Experiment (EUBURN), a meteorological airborne field programme designed to improve the observation, understanding, and prediction of extreme fire–atmosphere interactions in southern Europe. Beyond data collection, the programme also provides a framework for testing and assessing operational tools under realistic field conditions.

Within this context, and to support flight planning during the SILEX campaign, we implemented a prototype end-to-end chain combining near-real-time satellite fire detection, fire-event tracking, and coupled fire–atmosphere forecasting. New fire detections from Meteosat were processed operationally to identify emerging events, which were then used to trigger and initialize coupled ForeFire–MesoNH simulations. These simulations provided rapid short-term guidance on expected fire evolution, plume direction, plume-top height, smoke production, and the potential for extreme propagation or pyroconvective development.

The prototype was deployed operationally in France during summer 2025 and tested during the three-week SILEX campaign in July 2025. Over this period, more than 400 forecast runs were launched automatically following satellite detections, with a direct feedback loop to support scientific aircraft operations. The results show that such a system can deliver useful early information for airborne decision support, in particular for anticipating plume orientation, altitude, and fire development shortly after detection. This first real-scale deployment demonstrates the feasibility of integrating near-real-time detection and coupled fire–atmosphere forecasting into an operational workflow for wildfire observation campaigns, while also highlighting the need for broader benchmark datasets and quantitative evaluation for full forecasting-system assessment.