Articles | Volume 16, issue 1
https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-16-239-2016
https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-16-239-2016
Research article
 | 
21 Jan 2016
Research article |  | 21 Jan 2016

Risk of large-scale fires in boreal forests of Finland under changing climate

I. Lehtonen, A. Venäläinen, M. Kämäräinen, H. Peltola, and H. Gregow

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Aalto, J., Pirinen, P., Heikkinen, J., and Venäläinen, A.: Spatial interpolation of monthly climate data for Finland: comparing the performance of kriging and generalized additive models, Theor. Appl. Climatol., 112, 99–111, 2013.
Amatulli, G., Camia, A., and San-Miguel-Ayanz, J.: Estimating future burned areas under changing climate in the EU-Mediterranean countries, Sci. Total Environ., 450–451, 209–222, 2013.
Balshi, M. S., McGuire, A. D., Duffy, P., Flannigan, M., Walsh, J., and Melillo, J.: Assessing the response of area burned to changing climate in western boreal North America using a multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS) approach, Global Change Biol., 15, 578–600, 2009.
Cattiaux, J., Douville, H., and Peings, Y.: European temperatures in CMIP5: origins of present-day biases and future uncertainties, Clim. Dynam., 41, 2889–2907, 2013.
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Short summary
The number of large forest fires in Finland will most likely increase during the twenty-first century in response to projected climate change. This would increase the risk that some of the fires could develop into real conflagrations which have become almost extinct in Finland due to effective fire suppression. However, our results show considerable inter-model variability, demonstrating the large uncertainty related to the rate of the projected change in forest-fire danger.
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