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Forest fires cause environmental and economic damages every year, especially in the southern part of Europe. Estimation of the fire risk can vary from practical to scientific approach since different professions like firefighters, meteorologists, soldiers and foresters are involved. For fire risk assessment in Croatia (as in many other countries as well), Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI) is calculated daily. The aim of this presentation is to relate the burnt area and FWI in Croatia in recent years. In order to investigate new ideas for forest fire risk assessment, different data sources should be used. Although many open access data are available, only trusted data sources should be used for this work. One of the trusted data providers is Copernicus, which is the European Union’s Earth observation programme, implemented by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) on behalf of the European Commission. Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) is one of the six thematic information services within Copernicus. Inside Climate Data Store, C3S currently offers four products closely related to fires. Fire burnt area is available at different horizontal (from 250 m to 25 km) and temporal (from 15 days to 1 month) resolutions, with different temporal coverage (from 2001 to 2020). Copernicus Emergency Management Service provides daily fire danger indices at the finer horizontal (from 8 km to 10 km) and temporal (daily) resolutions. C3S provides Canadian, American and Australian fire danger indices at horizontal (25 km) and temporal (daily) resolutions with temporal coverage from 1979 to 2022. The amount of overall burnt area in Croatia for the time period 2017–2020 will be presented together with a comparison of Continental with Adriatic Croatia. We will also present which land cover was the most endangered and compare burnt areas inside and outside of the fire season. Analysis of Canadian FWI will be presented for the time period 2017-2021. The danger levels will be compared in time and space since the aim is to estimate how endangered is Croatia inside and outside of the fire season and how huge is the difference between the Continental and Adriatic parts. In spite of the limitations of C3S products (e.g. coarse horizontal and temporal resolutions, temporal coverage, different models, model setup), this study highlights possible advantages of using the open-access data, like enabling a deeper understanding of mechanisms related to the forest fires in Croatia and developing new approaches for forest fire risk assessment. |
