Fire weather index data under historical and shared socioeconomic pathway projections in the 6th phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project from 1850 to 2100

Abstract

Abstract. Human-induced climate change is increasing the incidence of fire events and associated impacts on livelihood, biodiversity, and nature across the world. Understanding current and projected fire activity together with its impacts on ecosystems is crucial for evaluating future risks and taking actions to prevent such devastating events. Here we focus on fire weather as a key driver of fire activity. Fire weather products that have a global homogenous distribution in time and space provide many advantages to advance fire science and evaluate future risks. Therefore, in this study we calculate and provide for the first time the Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI) with all available simulations of the 6th phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6). Furthermore, we expand its regional applicability by combining improvements to the original algorithm for the FWI from several packages. A sensitivity analysis of the default version versus our improved version shows significant differences in the final FWI. With the improved version, we calculate the FWI using average relative humidity in one case and minimum relative humidity in another case. We provide the data for both cases while recommending the one with minimum relative humidity for studies focused on actual FWI values and the one with average relative humidity for studies requiring larger ensembles. The following four annual indicators, (i) maximum value of the FWI (fwixx), (ii) number of days with extreme fire weather (fwixd), (iii) length of the fire season (fwils), and (iv) seasonal average of the FWI (fwisa), are made available and are illustrated here. We find that, at a global warming level of 3 ∘C, the mean fire weather would increase on average by at least 66 % in duration and frequency, while associated 1-in-10-year events would approximately triple in duration and increase by at least 31 % in intensity. Ultimately, this new fire weather dataset provides a large ensemble of simulations to understand the potential impacts of climate change spanning a range of shared socioeconomic narratives with their radiative forcing trajectories over 1850–2100 at annual and 2.5∘ × 2.5∘ resolutions. The produced full global dataset is a freely available resource at https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000583391 (Quilcaille and Batibeniz, 2022) for fire danger studies and beyond, which highlights the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions for reducing fire impacts.