Self-Organised Criticality and the Response of Wildland Fires to Climate Change |
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| Authors: | Salvador Pueyo |
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| Institution: | (1) Departament d‘Ecologia, Universitat de Barcelona, Avgda. Diagonal 645, 08028 Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain |
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| Abstract: | Here I present a new approach to forecasting the effects of climate change on catastrophic events, based on the ‘self-organised
criticality’ concept from statistical physics. In particular, I develop the ‘self-organised critical fuel succession model’
(SOCFUS), which deals with wildland fires. I show that there is good agreement between model and data for the response pattern
of the whole fire size statistical distribution to weather fluctuations in a boreal forest region. I tentatively predict the
fire regime in this region for an instance of possible climate change scenario. I show that the immediate response is sharper
than usually thought, but part of the added burning rate might not persist indefinitely. A large fraction of the extra burning
in the transition period is likely to be concentrated in a few ‘climate change fires’, much larger than the largest fires
that could currently occur. I also suggest that the major fire events recently observed in some tropical rainforest regions
belong to a qualitatively different, even more abrupt type of response, which is also predicted by the model.
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