Connection of Solar Activities and Forest Fires in 2018: Events in the USA (California), Portugal and Greece

Abstract

The impact of solar activity on environmental processes is difficult to understand and complex for empirical modeling. This study aimed to establish forecast models of the meteorological conditions in the forest fire areas based on the solar activity parameters applying the neural networks approach. During July and August 2018, severe forest fires simultaneously occurred in the State of California (USA), Portugal, and Greece. Air temperature and humidity data together with solar parameters (integral flux of solar protons, differential electron flux and proton flux, solar wind plasma parameters, and solar radio flux at 10.7 cm data) were used in long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network ensembles. It is found that solar activity mostly affects the humidity for two stations in California and Portugal (an increase in the integral flux of solar protons of > 30 MeV by 10% increases the humidity by 3.25%, 1.65%, and 1.57%, respectively). Furthermore, an increase in air temperature of 10% increases the humidity by 2.55%, 2.01%, and 0.26%, respectively. It is shown that temperature is less sensitive to changes in solar parameters but depends on previous conditions (previous increase of 10% increases the current temperature by 0.75%, 0.34%, and 0.33%, respectively). Humidity in Greece is mostly impacted by solar flux F10.7 cm and previous values of humidity. An increase in these factors by 10% will lead to a decrease in the humidity of 3.89% or an increase of 1.31%, while air temperature mostly depends on ion temperature. If this factor increases by 10%, it will lead to air temperature rising by 0.42%.