| Abstract/Description or Keywords |
Researchers at the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium (PCIC) have recently evaluated the monthly drought code, which describes the moisture content of deep soil layers using monthly-average data, as a simple metric for fire weather. Relatively few fire activity projections have been done for BC. PCIC researchers also created a suite of future projections of fire weather for southeast British Columbia (BC, Figure 1). The objective of this research was to examine both changes to fire weather intensity and the uncertainties in future projections of fire frequency. Research results found: • There are significant correlations between the monthly drought code and the annual area burned at all five locations that were tested. • These correlations are comparable to those between annual area burned and the monthly drought code’s input variables (temperature and precipitation), more complex models and the six other fire weather indices tested. • The monthly drought code is a simple, but effective metric for simulating wildfire severity that requires comparatively little input data. It is found, using the monthly drought code, that a small number of high-quality valleybottom stations may be able to capture the large-scale features necessary to calculate fire weather indices, without requiring interpolation or high-resolution climate models. • The ability of statistical downscaling to reconstruct the historical monthly drought code varied and was best at drier stations. • Future projections of wildfire frequency have large uncertainties, with some projections suggesting statistically insignificant changes. This is due to the large uncertainty in precipitation projections from the climate models that were used to create the projections. Given the complex topography and relatively low density of meteorological observing stations in southeast BC, simulating fire weather in this region is difficult, and because of this, fire weather simulation in this region provides a rigorous test of the monthly drought code. The results of this research suggest that, given its performance and the small amount of input data needed, the monthly drought code could be useful as a metric for fire weather for regions throughout North America. |
