Evaluating the influence of Live Fuel Moisture Content on fire behavior and fire activity in Southern France - Presented to the 6th Fire Behavior and Fuels conference in Marseille (April 29-May 3, 2019)
2019
Pimont, François | Ruffault, Julien | Martin-StPaul, Nicolas | Dupuy, Jean-Luc | Ecologie des Forêts Méditerranéennes (URFM) ; Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement (INRAE)
Live Fuel Moisture Content (LFMC) – the ratio of the water mass to the dry mass of live fuel - is increasingly recognized as a critical factor of fire behavior (Rossa et al., 2016; Martin StPaul et al., 2018b; Pimont et al., 2018) and hazard (Dennison and Moritz, 2009; Ruffault et al., 2018; Martin StPaul et al., 2018b). This fuel parameter is obviously affected by drought and thus climate change. Here, we present some recent findings regarding how LFMC affects both fire behavior and activity based on statistical analyses applied to three datasets: a shrub fire experiment dataset (Anderson et al. 2015) for fire behavior and two extensive spatial datasets in Mediterranean France: LFMC (“Réseau Hydrique”) and fire activity (“Promethée”). Our results show that LFMC would be a significant factor of fire behavior and activity, especially below 100%, leading to an increase in fire rate of spread and fire occurrence by 200% in driest conditions (LFMC=43%), and by 400% for the occurrence of large fires,when compared to moister summer conditions (LFMC=100%)
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