Relationship between burned area and meteorological variable in Northwestern Patagonia.

DE TORRES, M., L. GHERMANDI AND G. PFISTER.

Coimbra, Portugal

Congreso; IV Intenational Conference on Forest Fire Research.; 2002

This work explores the influence on burned area and fire records in north-western Patagonia of precipitation and temperature. There was no simple regression model that fits significatively the relationship between the number of fires and the defined meteorological variables. Both in the forest and the steppe, the burned area correlates with precipitation and temperature for the fire season. We found that the autumn-winter precipitation was related with the burned area in the forest but not in the steppe. It was not possible to observe a tendency in the relation between temperature and the total burned area. Nevertheless, we observed that the greatest fires had occurred when the maximum temperatures exceeded the mean value for the 15 seasons considered and these fires occurred in years with severe drought.