Fire–weather relationship in the Italian peninsula

Climate and weather are two of the main key factors influencing fire regime and they have a number of different effects on fire. The objective of this work is to improve our knowledge of the relationship between meteorological variables and forest fire across Italian peninsula. In the first part of this work, we collected meteorological and fire events data. The second part of the work involved the assemblage of fire and weather data into a GIS to facilitate manipulation and display of the data and the classification of Italian peninsula in homogeneous climatic areas, through hierarchical cluster analysis of meteorological data. A set of parametric and not parametric statistical tests were used to analyse the fire-weather relathionships. The results showed that both fire number and burned area are highly related with rainfall in summer and winter, considering both peninsular Italy and each cluster. The results confirmed the crucial role of high resolution datasets in analyzing fire and weather trends and relationships, and could be promisingly applied as input to develop and calibrate models for studying the impacts of climate change on fires.