Authors
IR Urbieta, G Zavala, M Martín
Description
Fire occurrence is favoured by flammable vegetation and desiccating climate conditions such as high temperatures, low relative air humidity and drought. The coming climate change is expected to increase the number of heat waves and rainless days; this will tend to desiccate living and dead vegetation and make it more flammable. Furthermore the danger periods and extreme situations are likely to increase with time. That being so, there is now a pressing need to assess how fire danger might vary in the future, doing so with as much spatial detail as possible. This article sums up the results of a research project into the present and future fire danger in the region of Castilla-La Mancha. A study has been made of the region’s recent fire history. Fire weather risk is mapped against different end-of-twenty-first-century climate-change scenarios and an estimate is made of how long the fire alert and risk period will last in …