About FLAME

Overview

Extreme fire behaviour can occur on any spatial scale, in any fuel type, and at any time of the day or night, jeopardising the safety of firefighters and civilians.

Addressing extreme fire weather and behaviour is a subject of paramount importance to wildfire management, including the training and safety of firefighting personnel and the development of tools that assist fire managers in better identifying those situations where extreme fire behaviour may occur. In that regard, FLAME aims to advance the scientific knowledge on extreme fire weather and behaviour in Greece, in order to increase awareness and preparedness.

Objectives

🔥 To compile the climatology of critical fire weather patterns (i.e., atmospheric conditions that promote extreme fire behaviour), determining their frequency, strength and duration during a typical fire season, and verifying any relationship between their occurrence and atmospheric teleconnections or/and sea-surface temperature anomalies.
🔥 To compile a database of extreme wildfire events, examine the processes and conditions under which major transitions in fire behaviour took place, and identify if threshold conditions exist, which could allow for predicting extreme fire behaviour from environmental conditions.
🔥 To advance the capacity of a coupled fire-atmosphere modelling system with respect to accurate fire spread prediction, particularly under extreme fire weather conditions, by explicitly considering the influence of atmospheric stability through the development and implementation of a wind gust parameterisation scheme.

Work plan

WP1

Manage, monitor and coordinate the scientific and financial realisation of the project.

WP4

Explicitly account for the concept of atmospheric stability in a coupled fire-atmosphere modelling system by developing and implementing a wind gust parameterisation scheme.

WP2

Define Greece’s critical fire weather patterns, determining their key characteristics and possible relationships with atmosphere teleconnections and/or SST anomalies.

WP5

Promote the publicity of FLAME, raising awareness about the outcomes of the project and the achieved developments.

WP3

Describe and characterise the dynamical processes related to Greece’s critical fire weather patterns, verifying the existence of threshold conditions that could be used for predicting extreme fire behaviour.