Advance Effis Report On Forest Fires In Europe Middle East And North Africa 2019

The EFFIS Danger Forecast was developed to support the Commission's Directorate-General for the Environment and the forest fire-fighting services in the EU Member States. From 2002, at the request of the Member States, operation of the EFFIS Danger Forecast was extended to six months starting on 1 May and ending on 31 October, and in 2006 to nine months, from 1 February to 31 October. From 2008 the EFFIS Danger Forecast system has run continuously throughout the year without interruption. The geographic extent has been enlarged over the years from the initial extent that covered only the Mediterranean region. Now the system covers the whole of Europe and MENA (Middle East & North Africa) countries. The meteorological data used to run the model has also changed during the years. At the beginning the system started using forecasted data provided by MeteoFrance with a spatial resolution of around 50 km. Then over time other providers were included, such as DWD (Deutscher Wetterdienst) and ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast) and the resolution has improved. Now the system runs with three different data sets from three providers: ECMWF (the primary), Meteo France and DWD; with a spatial resolution in a range from around 10 km to 25 km. In this chapter the fire danger trends assessed by EFFIS in the different countries during the 2019 fire season are presented, comparing them with previous years. Through the Danger Forecast module of EFFIS the situation has been continuously monitored and the risk level analysed and mapped. The following figures show fire danger through 2019 as determined by the average FWI values assessed during the fire season in the individual countries. In 2019 many countries saw higher than average FWI values relatively early in the year. The graphs show the weekly averages of FWI over entire countries; therefore local peaks might have been flattened, especially in those countries such as France or Italy, where there are strong differences in fire danger level with changing latitudes; nevertheless the general trend is depicted providing relevant information about the fire danger level and trends of the year. To allow a better comparison with past seasons, the curves of 2015-2017 are presented in conjunction with 2018 for all countries. The countries analysed are those participating in the EFFIS network for which data are available, and are presented in alphabetic order within the two groups (European countries and MENA countries).