Estimating future wildfire burnt area over Greece using the JULES-INFERNO model

Abstract. Our previous studies have shown that fire weather conditions in the Mediterranean and specifically over Greece are expected to become more severe with climate change, impling potential increases in burnt area. Here, we employ the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES) coupled with the INFERNO fire model driven by future climate projections from the UKESM1 model to investigate the repercussions of climate change and future vegetation changes on burnt area over Greece. We validate modelled burnt area against the satellite-derived GFED5 dataset, and find the model’s performance to be good, especially for the more fire-prone parts of the country in the south Greece. For future simulations, we use future climate data following three Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), consisting of an optimistic climate change scenario where fossil fuel emissions peak and decline beyond 2020 (SSP126), a middle-of-the-road scenario (SSP370), and a pessimistic scenario where emissions continue to rise throughout the century (SSP8.5). Our results show increased burnt area in the future compared to the present-day period in response to overall hotter and drier climatological conditions. We use an additional JULES-INFERNO simulation in which dynamic vegetation was activated, and find that it features smaller future burned area increases compared to our simulation with static present-day vegetation. For this dynamically changing vegetation simulation the greatest burnt area increases are found for southern Greece, due to higher future availability of flammable and heat-resistant needleleaf trees and the smallest decreases in agricultural areas of northern Greece due to a reduction in the aforementioned tree category.