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Technical University of Crete
Technical University of Crete
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| URI: | http://purl.tuc.gr/dl/dias/26E74AD8-194A-4D1B-946A-52176843CAF3 | ||
| Year | 2024 | ||
| Type of Item | Diploma Work | ||
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| Bibliographic Citation | Anastasia Demiroglou, "Forest fires in Greece 2000-2020 / Correlation between Canadian Fire Weather Index and burnt area", Diploma Work, School of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, Technical University of Crete, Chania, Greece, 2024 https://doi.org/10.26233/heallink.tuc.99655 | ||
| Appears in Collections |
One of the most serious environmental problems, nowadays, is forest fires. Forest fires are a natural phenomenon and they are considered as a type of natural disaster. In recent years, they have been one of the most serious threats to the forests of the Mediterranean, and by extension, Greece. Their effects are enormous and they have impacts on both the environment and society. Furthermore, destructive wildfires are expected to increase in frequency and size in the future, due to climate change.The behavior of a forest fire depends on a variety of factors, which can be either natural or man-made. The factors that largely determine the intensity and spread of wildfires are mainly of a meteorological nature.Alongside the need for forest fire prevention and comprehensive management, the development and use of a fire weather index is imperative. One of the most widespread and widely used such indices is the Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI) which depends exclusively on weather conditions. This index reflects the risk of a fire starting depending on the prevailing meteorological conditions.The ultimate purpose of this work is the evaluation of the Canadian FWI for the case of Greece. More specifically, we validate whether the index had a sufficient value that predicted the danger of individual fires and their size at the start and spread of these fires. With this in mind, the correlations between the burnt area (BA) and the FWI were investigated, for each prefecture of Greece, for the period 2000-2020, using ground-based observations of BA provided by Greek Fire Service. In order to understand the correlation of the two variables, the investigation was done with two methods. The first concerns their correlation over time (day, ten days, month) and the second by grouping the data according to the magnitude of the BA.The results demonstrate that FWI is quite well correlated with the BA mainly in the central regions of the country, where stronger correlations are shown. On the contrary, in the northern regions the correlation is weaker, which may be due to the colder climate and therefore the lower number of recorded forest fires.
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