AbstractsPhysics

Roughly three-quarters of Finland s area is covered by forests. Any climatological changes influencing the danger of forest fire are important to evaluate and consider. The objective of this thesis is to study the long-term past and future changes in climatically-driven forest fire danger in Finland based on the summertime mean temperature and precipitation sum. The work is composed of two parts. In the first part, long-term gridded datasets of observed monthly mean temperatures and precipitation sums for Finland are developed. In the second part, these gridded datasets are used together with calculated values of the Finnish Forest Fire Index and probabilistic climate model simulations (from the ENSEMBLES project) to estimate the number of forest fire danger days during the summer season (June-August). The long-term variation of Finland s climatological forest fire danger is studied roughly for 100 years backwards and into the future. One of the main achievements of this thesis is that it explores the possibility of quantifying past and future fire-weather using a relatively limited database with regard to both weather variables and their spatial coverage. This enables a wider exploitation of scattered data series from earlier times and can also provide opportunities for projections using data with a low resolution. The climatological forest fire danger in Finland varies considerably from year to year. There have not been any significant increasing or decreasing trends in the number of fire danger days during the 20th century (1908-2011). On average, the highest probability of forest fire danger occurs in June and July, when a fire hazard exists on roughly 35-40% of all days. The intra-seasonal variation of fire danger has been large enough to enable the occurrence of conflagrations even though the fire danger for the season as a whole has been at an average level. Despite the projected increase in average summertime precipitation, the Finnish climate will provide more favourable conditions for the occurrence of forest fires in the future than today. This is due to increases in the mean temperature. The probability of an increase in the number of fire danger days is 56-75% in the near future (2010-2029) and 71-91% by the end of the current century (2080-2099), depending on the region. This would indicate an increase of 1-2 and 7-10 days, respectively. It is thus clearly important to further develop existing tools for the forecasting of fire danger, and to maintain the capabilities of the fire prevention, surveillance and suppression services. Future projections of all relevant meteorological variables (temperature, precipitation, humidity, evaporation and wind speed) at higher temporal and spatial resolutions, in addition to information on the type of the summertime precipitation and the length of the dry periods, would notably improve the assessment of the future climatological forest fire danger. Noin neljännes Suomen pinta-alasta on metsää. Sää ja ilmasto ovat eräitä tärkeitä metsien paloherkkyyteen…