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Author(s):
Scott Clark, Graham A. Mills, Timothy J. Brown, Sarah Harris, John T. Abatzoglou
Year Published:

Cataloging Information

Topic(s):
Fire Behavior
Simulation Modeling
Weather

NRFSN number: 23467
FRAMES RCS number: 64295
Record updated:

Anthropogenic climate change is expected to cause an increase in fire danger over south-eastern Australia during the 21st century, primarily driven by increased surface temperature. Studies of future fire weather in Victoria, Australia, have so far mostly utilised direct output from general circulation models, which have inadequate resolution for resolving the dynamics of local fire danger and are prone to substantial biases that may affect the seasonality of dry fuels. In this paper, we assess the ability of the Multivariate Adaptive Constructed Analogs (MACA) method to downscale output from general circulation models over Victoria, and replicate statistical attributes of fire danger indices. We find that climatological descriptors of meteorological variables of wind, temperature and humidity are captured extremely well, and fields on extreme fire days are well captured. We find that the method works very well for statistically downscaling fire weather elements over Victoria and provides a vehicle to assess the regional variation of fire weather projections over Victoria.

Citation

Clark, Scott; Mills, Graham A.; Brown, Tim J.; Harris, Sarah; Abatzoglou, John T. 2021. Downscaled GCM climate projections of fire weather over Victoria, Australia. Part 1: evaluation of the MACA technique. International Journal of Wildland Fire 30(8):585-595. https://doi.org/10.1071/WF20174

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