Spatiotemporal analysis of the FWI over Europe and North Africa: Historical trends and climate projections under RCP4.5 and RCP8.5
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
• FWI trends analyzed over Europe & N. Africa from 1979 to 2098. • Extreme fire danger increases under both RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios. • Strong agreement (r > 0.8) between reanalysis and GCMs in fire-prone areas. • Southern regions show significant increasing trends in FWI. Wildfires represent an escalating environmental threat across Europe and North Africa, increasingly exacerbated by climate-driven shifts in temperature, precipitation, and drought patterns. However, there is still limited large-scale, methodologically consistent research that simultaneously assesses historical patterns and future projections of fire danger across these regions, particularly in terms of both frequency and duration of risk under different climate scenarios. This study addresses this gap by providing a high-resolution, spatiotemporal assessment of fire weather conditions, with the aim of offering critical insights to support climate-adaptive fire management strategies, extended preparedness frameworks, and the integration of future fire weather projections into land-use and risk governance policies. To achieve this, we investigate historical (1979–2021) and projected (2000–2098) trends in fire danger using the Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI), based on ERA5 reanalysis data and outputs from five Global Climate Models (GCMs) under RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios. Over 50,000 land grid cells were analyzed to assess the frequency and duration of six FWI danger classes. Different metrics were used to quantify the agreement between historical reanalysis data and GCM outputs, while the Seasonal Kendall (SK) test was applied to detect trends. Results reveal a substantial decline in the duration of the very low FWI class, from 36 to 23 months, and significant increases in both the duration and frequency of the extreme FWI class, reaching up to 6.38 months and 14.42 % under the RCP8.5 scenario. Correlation coefficients exceed 0.8 across much of Southern Europe and North Africa, indicating strong temporal agreement. Trend analyses reveal statistically significant increases in fire danger across southern latitudes, while Northern Europe shows mixed or decreasing trends. These findings project a dramatic intensification and expansion of fire-prone conditions, particularly under high-emission scenarios.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it