Abstract
In Canadian forests, the majority of burned area occurs on a small number of days of extreme fire weather. These days lie within the tail end of the distribution of fire weather, and are often the periods when fire suppression capacity is most challenged. We examined the historic and future frequency of such extreme fire weather events across 16 fire regime zones in the forested regions of Canada from 1970 to the year 2090. Two measurements are used to measure the extreme fire weather events, the 95th percentile of Fire Weather Index (FWI95) and the number of spread days. The annual frequency of fire spread days is modelled to increase 35–400 % by 2050 with the greatest absolute increases occurring in the Boreal Plains of Alberta and Saskatchewan. The largest proportional increase in the number of spread days is modelled to occur in coastal and temperate forests. This large increase in spread days was found despite a modest average increase in FWI95. Our findings suggest that the impact of future climate change in Canadian forests is sufficient to increase the number of days with active fire spread. Fire management agencies in coastal and temperate regions may need to adapt their planning and capacity to deal with proportionally larger changes to their fire weather regime compared to the already high fire management capacity found in drier continental regions.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abatzoglou JT, Kolden CA (2013) Relationships between climate and macroscale area burned in the Western United States. Int J Wildland Fire 22:1003–1020
Alexander ME, Cruz MG (2011) Crown fire dynamics in conifer forests. pp 1007–144. In: Synthesis of knowledge of extreme fire behavior: volume I for fire managers. Gen. Tech. Report PNW-GTR-854. USDA For. Serv., Pacific Northwest Experiment Station, Portland
Amiro BD, Logan KA, Wotton BM, Flannigan MD, Todd JB, Stocks BJ, Martell DL (2004) Fire weather index system components of large fires in the Canadian boreal forest. Int J Wildland Fire 13:391–400
Balshi MS, McGuire AD, Duffy P, Flannigan MD, Walsh J, Melillo J (2009) Assessing the response of area burned to changing climate in western boreal North America using a Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines (MARS) approach. Glob Chang Biol 15:578–600
Bedia J, Herrera S, San Martín D, Gutiérrez J, Koutsias N (2013) Robust projections of fire weather index in the mediterranean using statistical downscaling. Clim Chang 120:229–247
Beverly JL, Flannigan MD, Stocks BJ, Bothwell P (2011) The association between Northern Hemisphere climate patterns and interannual variability in Canadian wildfire activity. Can J For Res 41:2193–2201
Blennow K, Olofsson E (2008) The probability of wind damage in forestry under a changed wind climate. Clim Chang 87:347–360
Boulanger Y, Gauthier S, Burton PJ, Vaillancourt MA (2012) An alternative fire regime zonation for Canada. Int J Wildland Fire 21:1052–1064
Cary GJ, Keane RE, Gardner RH, Lavorel S, Flannigan MD, Davies ID, Li C, Lenihan JM, Rupp TS, Mouillot F (2006) Comparison of the sensitivity of landscape-fire-succession models to variation in terrain, fuel pattern, climate and weather. Landsc Ecol 21:121–137
R Core Team (2014) R: a language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna. URL HYPERLINK http://www.R-project.org/
Dai A (2012) Increasing drought under global warming in observations and models. Nat Clim Chang 3:52–58
de Groot WJ, Pritchard JM, Lynham TJ (2009) Forest floor fuel consumption and carbon emissions in Canadian boreal forest fires. Can J For Res 39(2):367–382
de Groot WJ, Flannigan MD, Cantin AS (2013) Climate change impacts on future boreal fire regimes. For Ecol Manag 294:35–44
Dennison PE, Brewer SC, Arnold JD, Moritz MA (2014) Large wildfire trends in the western United States, 1984–2011. Geophys Res Lett 41:2928–2933
Dowdy AJ, Mills GA, Finkele K, de Groot W (2009) Index sensitivity analysis applied to the Canadian forest fire weather index and the McArthur forest fire danger index. Meteorol Appl 17:298–312
Ecological Stratification Working Group (ESWG) (1996) A national ecological framework for Canada. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and Environment Canada, Ottawa
Flannigan MD, Van Wagner CE (1991) Climate change and wildfire in Canada. Can J For Res 21:66–72
Flannigan MD, Wotton BM (2001) Forest Fires: Behavior and Ecological Effects., pp 335–357
Flannigan MD, Logan KA, Amiro BD, Skinner WR, Stocks BJ (2005) Future area burned in Canada. Clim Chang 72:1–16
Flannigan MD, Krawchuk MA, de Groot WJ, Wotton BM, Gowman LM (2009a) Implications of changing climate for global wildland fire. Int J Wildland Fire 18:483–507
Flannigan MD, Stocks BJ, Turetsky MR, Wotton BM (2009b) Impact of climate change on fire activity and fire management in the circumboreal forest. Glob Chang Biol 15:549–560
Fowler HJ, Blenkinsop S, Tebaldi C (2007) Linking climate change modelling to impacts studies: recent advances in downscaling techniques for hydrological modelling. Int J Clim 27:1547–1578
Green PJ, Silverman BW (1994) Nonparametric regression and generalized linear models: a roughness penalty approach. Volume 58 of Monographs on statistics and applied probability. Chapman & Hall, London
IPCC (2007) Climate change 2007: synthesis report. In: Core Writing Team, Pachauri RK, Reisinger A (eds) Contribution of working groups I, II and III to the Fourth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. IPCC, Geneva, 104 pp
Johnstone JF, Hollingsworth TN, Chapin FS, Mack MC (2010) Changes in fire regime break the legacy lock on successional trajectories in Alaskan boreal forest. Glob Chang Biol 16:1281–1295
Lawson BD, Dalrymple GN (1996) Ground-truthing the drought code: Field verification of overwinter recharge of forest floor moisture. Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Forest Service, Pacific Forestry Centre, Victoria. FRDA Report 268
Mbogga MS, Wang X, Hamann A (2010) Bioclimate envelope model predictions for natural resource management: dealing with uncertainty. J Appl Ecol 47:731–740
Meehl GA, Covey C, Taylor KE, Delworth T, Stouffer RJ, Latif M, McAvaney B, Mitchell JFB (2007) The WCRP CMIP3 multimodel dataset: A new era in climate change research. Am Meteorol Soc 88:1383–1394
Moritz MA, Parisien M-A, Batllori E, Krawchuk MA, Van Dorn J, Ganz DJ, Hayhoe K (2012) Climate change and disruptions to global fire activity. Ecosphere 3:1–22
Parisien M-A, Kafka VG, Hirsch KG, Todd BM, Lavoie SG, Maczek PD (2005) Mapping fire susceptibility with the Burn-P3 simulation model. Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Forest Service, Northern Forestry Centre, Edmonton, Alberta, Information Report NOR-X-405
Parisien M-A, Parks SA, Krawchuk MA, Flannigan MD, Bowman LM, Moritz MA (2011) Scale-dependent controls on the area burned in the boreal forest of Canada, 1980–2005. Ecol Appl 21:789–805
Pinheiro J, Bates D, DebRoy S, Sarkar D, R Core Team (2014) nlme: linear and nonlinear mixed effects models. R package version 3.1-117, http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=nlme
Podur J, Wotton BM (2011) Defining fire spread event days for fire-growth modelling. Int J Wildland Fire 20:497–507
Rothermel RC, Hartford RA, Chase CH (1994) Fire growth maps for the 1988 Greater Yellowstone Area fires. Gen. Tech. Report INT-304. USDA, Forest Service, Intermountain Research Station
Shabbar A, Skinner W, Flannigan MD (2011) Prediction of seasonal forest fire severity in Canada from large-scale climate patterns. J Appl Meteorol Climatol 50:785–799
Skinner WR, Flannigan MD, Stocks BJ, Martell DM, Wotton BM, Todd JB, Mason JA, Logan KA, Bosch EM (2002) A 500 hPa synoptic wildland fire climatology for large Canadian forest fires, 1959–1996. Theor Appl Climatol 71:157–169
Stocks BJ, Lawson BD, Alexander ME, Van Wagner CE, McAlpine RS, Lynham TJ, Dube DE (1989) Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System: an overview. For Chron 65:450–457
Stocks BJ, Mason JA, Todd JB, Bosch EM, Wotton BM, Amiro BD, Flannigan MD, Hirsch KG, Logan KA, Martell DL, Skinner WR (2002) Large forest fires in Canada, 1959–1997. J Geophys Res Atmos 107(D1):FFR-5
Stralberg D (2012) General circulation model recommendations for Alberta. ABMI biodiversity and climate change adaptation project/University of Alberta. http://www.biodiversityandclimate.abmi.ca/docs/Stralberg_2012_General_circulation_model_recommendations_for_Alberta_ABMI.pdf. Accessed 15 July 2014
Stralberg D, Matsuoka SM, Hamann A, Bayne EM, Sólymos P, Schmiegelow FKA, Wang X, Cumming SG, Song SJ (2015) Projecting boreal bird responses to climate change: the signal exceeds the noise. Appl Ecol 25:52–69
Taylor SW, Alexander ME (2006) Science, technology, and human factors in fire danger rating: the Canadian experience. Int J Wildland Fire 15:121–135
Van Wagner CE (1977) Conditions for the start and spread of crown fire. Can J For Res 7:23–34
Van Wagner CE (1987) Development and structure of the Canadian forest fire weather index system. Forestry technical report 35. Canadian Forest Service, Ottawa
Wang X, Cantin A, Parisien M-A, Wotton BM, Anderson K, Flannigan MD (2012) fwi.fbp: Fire weather index system and fire behaviour prediction system calculations https://r-forge.r-project.org/projects/fwi-fbp/
Wang X, Parisien M-A, Flannigan MD, Parks SA, Anderson KR, Little JM, Taylor SW (2014) The potential and realized spread of wildfires across Canada. Glob Chang Biol 20:2518–2530
Westerling AL, Hidalgo HG, Cayan DR, Swetnam TW (2006) Warming and earlier spring increase western US forest wildfire activity. Science 313:940–943
Wotton BM, Flannigan MD (1993) Length of the fire season in a changing climate. For Chron 69:187–192
Zuur AF, Ieno EN, Walker NJ, Saveliev AA, Smith GM (2009) Mixed effects models and extensions in ecology with R. Springer, New York, pp 459–468
Acknowledgements
We thank Dr. Peter Solymos for his advice on statistical analysis, Dr. Mike Wotton for the guidance on the FWI System, and John Little for his assistant in compiling the baseline FWI data.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Electronic supplementary material
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Appendix I
(DOCX 14 kb)
Appendix II
(DOCX 720 kb)
Appendix III
(DOCX 14 kb)
Appendix IV
(DOCX 245 kb)
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Wang, X., Thompson, D.K., Marshall, G.A. et al. Increasing frequency of extreme fire weather in Canada with climate change. Climatic Change 130, 573–586 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-015-1375-5
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-015-1375-5