EXTREME project, a modelling chain to support the prevention and management of extreme wildfires in Sardinia

Wildfire regime in Sardinia has been historically affected by the socio-economic conditions and their relationships with meteo-climatic conditions. A recent abrupt change on fire regime was observed at the end of 1970s, when socio-economic variations, mainly land abandonment and land use changes, were responsible of an increase in fire occurrence and in large catastrophic wildfires. This caused serious damages to forestry, agricultural and anthropic values, but in particular losses of human lives. The analysis of fire time series showed a large inter-annual variability of the burned areas and, as in other countries of the Mediterranean basin. Such variability is mainly due to the occurrence of wildfires with extreme behaviour concentrated in a limited number of days. These days are typically characterised by the advection of warm and dry air masses from North Africa. The aim of this project is (1) to study the synoptic patterns associated with extreme wildfire behaviour, (2) to propose a set of tools for the prediction of wildfire behaviour considering different weather scenarios, (3) to estimate the economic costs potentially associated with large wildfires, and (4) to characterize wildfire exposure and risk at regional and local scale. In order to provide the tools to predict fire behaviour some experimental activities were devoted to the comparison of different methods to obtain the simulation of wind field using both a mass-consistent model and a computational fluid dynamics models from the initial conditions provided by mesoscale meteorological models with different schemes of nesting and resolutions.