Abstract
It is crucial to investigate the characteristics of fire danger in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH) region to improve the accuracy of local fire danger monitoring, forecasting, and management. With the use of instrumental observation data from 173 national meteorological stations in the BTH region from 1991 to 2020, the fire weather index (FWI) is first calculated in this study, and its spatiotemporal characteristics are analyzed. The high- and low-fire danger periods based on the FWI occur in April and August, respectively, with significant decreasing and increasing trends throughout the BTH region over the past 30 years. Next, the contributions of different meteorological factors to the FWI are quantified via a detrending technique. Most regions are affected by precipitation during the high-fire danger period. Both the maximum surface air temperature (Tmax) and precipitation, however, notably contribute to the FWI trend changes during the low-fire danger period. Then, we assess the linkage with atmospheric circulation. Abundant water vapor from the Northwest Pacific and local upward motion jointly lead to increased precipitation and, as a consequence, a decreased FWI during the high-fire danger period. A lack of water vapor from the boreal zone and local downward movement could cause adiabatic subsidence and hence, amplify the temperature and FWI during the low-fire danger period. In contrast to shared socioeconomic pathway (SSP) 585, in which the FWI in the BTH region exhibits a north–south dipole during the low-fire danger period, SSP245 yields an east–west dipole during the low-fire danger period. This study reveals that there is a higher-than-expected probability of fire danger during the low-fire danger period. Therefore, it is essential to intensify research on the fire danger during the low-fire danger period to improve our ability to predict summer fire danger.
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Data Availability
All data used in this study are publicly available and can be downloaded from the corresponding websites. The daily meteorological observation data were provided by the National Meteorological Information Center (http://data.cma.cn/). The climate model data used in this study can be obtained from the CMIP6 archives at https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/search/cmip6/. The atmospheric circulation in NCEP2 was derived by Kanamitsu et al. (2002), which could be downloaded from https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.ncep.reanalysis2.html.
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Funding
We acknowledge financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (no. 42171030; no. 42305055), the Science and Technology Project of Beijing Meteorological Service (no. BMBKJ202302001), the Key Project of Beijing Academy of Emergency Management Science and Technology (no. Y2023046), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (no. 41901017) and Open Foundation of Key Laboratory of Land Surface Pattern and Simulation, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
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Conceptualization: MB, WD, and ZH. methodology: MB, WD, and ZH. Software: MB, MW, CZ, and PX. Data curation: MW, CZ, and PX. Analysis: MB, WD, ZH, and MW. Writing—original draft: MB and MW. Writing—review and editing: WD and ZH.
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Bai, M., Du, W., Wu, M. et al. Variation in fire danger in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region over the past 30 years and its linkage with atmospheric circulation. Climatic Change 177, 27 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-024-03689-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-024-03689-3