Nordic and European Summer Droughts in a Past, Current and Future Perspective

The recent summer drought events in Europe and their associated devastating wildfires highlight the importance of understanding and predicting such extreme events and their impact.

Spatial and temporal distribution of fire occurrences in Norway over the period 2016–2019 (based on wildfire data from http://www.brannstatistikk.no/). Figure 3b of Bakke et al., 2021: https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-2021-384

On this project, we investigate the relation between non-linear trends in atmospheric pressure and meteorological dryness, and apply empirical orthogonal function to link the large-scale atmospheric systems with the local responses in northern European streamflow. Additionally, we develop a data-driven spatiotemporal prediction model of northern European wildfire danger by using tree-based machine learning algorithms (Random Forest, Decision Tree and AdaBoost) with a wide range of indices as potential predictors. The resulting model can be used to map wildfire danger and highlight the importance of predictors not included in traditional fire danger indices.

Tags: Anomalies and changepoints, Boosting, Dimensionality reduction, Ensemble learning, Non-linear dynamics, Non-parametric and semi-parametric methods, Time series, Visualization, Earth and environmental sciences
Published July 6, 2023 1:50 PM - Last modified Oct. 23, 2023 11:55 AM