Supervisors info:
Καθηγητής Δρ. Π. Νάστος, Μαρία Χατζάκη, Λέκτορας ΕΚΠΑ, Ε. Βασιλάκης, Επικ. Καθηγητής ΕΚΠΑ
Summary:
Wildfires, as integral earth system processes, play an important role in
terrestrial ecosystems and in light of the warming climate it is crucial to
understand their controlling factors. Fire danger is a term used to describe
the assessment of both the static and dynamic factors of the fire environment
which determine the ease of ignition, rate of spread, difficulty of control and
impact of a fire. Here, a fire danger assessment is attempted for the island of
Crete, an eastern Mediterranean environment that exhibits increased
vulnerability to wildfires.
The static factors are the morphological and topographical features, as the
land use/land cover, inclination, aspect,, proximity to roads, high voltage
lines (from Corine Landcover-CLC2000, GEODATA.gov.gr, and ADMIE databases).
Each factor is distributed in severity levels, and then, a static danger
assessment module is constructed by combining all factors with different given
weighting, based on proposed guidelines for wildfires prevention.
The exposure to fire danger, as a function of meteorological conditions, is
considered as the dynamic factor and it is assessed by the Canadian Fire
Weather Index (FWI). FWI is a daily meteorologically-based index used
worldwide, including the Mediterranean, to estimate fire danger. Both static
and dynamic factors are then combined to build an integrated danger assessment
module.
For the evaluation of the module, MODIS active fire product (MCD14ML) that
provides information about the location of fires burning at the time of
satellite overpass is used, for the 2003-2014 period.
Acknowledgment: We kindly acknowledge the Regional Administration of Fire
Service of Crete and the Fire Service Department of Rethimnon for providing the
fire prevention data.
Keywords:
Assessment, Fire, Static, Dynamic, Danger
