Adaptation of the Canadian Fire Weather Index to Mediterranean forests

Author

Stefano Chelli (stefano.chelli@gmail.com), Pierluigi Maponi (pierluigi.maponi@unicam.it), Giandiego Campetella (diego.campetella@unicam.it), Paolo Monteverde (paolo.monteverde@gmail.com), Monica Foglia (foglia.monica@gmail.com), Eleonora Paris (eleonora.paris@unicam.it), Andreas Lolis (andreaslolis@yahoo.gr) and Thomas Panagopoulos (tpanago@ualg.pt)

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2015, vol. 75, issue 2, pages 1795-1810

Abstract: The Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI) is one of the most used tools to forecast forest fire hazard. In this paper, we propose an adaptation of the FWI to take into account the Mediterranean vegetation and climate, to improve FWI performances for areas with these characteristics. In particular, the FWI has been calibrated for two Mediterranean regions (Algarve, Portugal and Peloponnese, Greece) by fitting the experimental data, collected in the field, for the forest fuel moisture content, with the values expected by the application of the original Canadian FWI. Field data were collected during the 2010 and 2011 fire seasons. The satisfactory results obtained by the adaptation of parameters from the original FWI, in spite of the small sample areas and limited time of collection, allowed us to verify the usefulness of the method in describing the fuel moisture dynamics and obtaining indexes closer to the characteristics of the Mediterranean forests considered. The adapted FWI, if further tested and extended to other sample areas, may help in a more detailed and precise application of the FWI index by improving the daily forest fire hazard forecast, to become also a better support for the Civil Protection Agency of Mediterranean countries. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Keywords: Forest fire hazard; Mediterranean regions; Fire Weather Index (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11069-014-1397-8 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:nathaz:v:75:y:2015:i:2:p:1795-1810

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11069

Access Statistics for this article

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards is currently edited by Thomas Glade, Tad S. Murty and Vladimír Schenk

More articles in Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards from Springer, International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards
Series data maintained by Sonal Shukla (sonal.shukla@springer.com).

For further details log on website :
http://econpapers.repec.org/article/sprnathaz/v_3a75_3ay_3a2015_3ai_3a2_3ap_3a1795-1810.htm