{"id":58212,"date":"2025-06-30T15:16:22","date_gmt":"2025-06-30T13:16:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nilu.gnist.dev\/?p=58212"},"modified":"2025-06-30T15:16:22","modified_gmt":"2025-06-30T13:16:22","slug":"summer-in-central-europe-drought-and-fire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nilu.gnist.dev\/en\/2025\/06\/summer-in-central-europe-drought-and-fire\/","title":{"rendered":"Summer in Central Europe: Drought and fire to be expected"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to Copernicus Climate Change Service, Europe has been warming twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s. It is now the fastest-warming continent on Earth. Last year was the warmest ever, and there is little chance of 2025 slowing the race.<\/p>\n

Heatwaves are becoming more frequent and severe, with ever more widespread droughts. With such droughts, the risk of wildfires is rising globally.<\/p>\n

Drought in Central Europe, rain in Norway<\/h2>\n

\u201cAccording to the EFFIS Longterm Seasonal Forecast<\/a>, July and August 2025 are foreseen as hot and dry for central Europe. Hot and dry weather significantly increases wildfire risk by creating favorable conditions for ignition, fire spread, and high intensity. Elevated temperatures and reduced rainfall dry out live and dead vegetation. When they occur at the same time, the desiccation of fine fuels such as grasses, leaves, and twigs on the ground is amplified. This makes them much more susceptible to fire ignition from natural or anthropogenic causes,\u201d says Dr Johannes Kaiser from NILU\u2019s Department of Atmosphere and Climate.<\/p>\n

Forecasting can be explained as a process of making predictions based on\u00a0the study and analysis of past\u00a0and present data. Later, these forecasts can be compared with what actually has happened and be improved accordingly. Most of us are already familiar with weather forecasting, where weather conditions are predicted on the basis of the most recent meteorological observations.<\/p>\n

\u201cFire danger forecast as seen in EFFIS shows that the fire risk for large forest fires should be low in Norway until end of June. While the forecast shows a warm summer, there are good chances for rain in mid-Norway in July and also in southernmost Norwegian regions in August. This is great for preventing forest fires, but not so positive if you are planning to spend the holiday here,\u201d says Kaiser\u2019s colleague, Dr Nikolaos Evangeliou.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
The EFFIS Long-term seasonal forecast of temperature and rainfall anomalies. Red signals positive\/warmer temperatures on the left side, and negative\/less rain on the right side. According to the forecast, July and August 2025 will most likely be warm, but with chances of rain in mid- and south Norway in July and in August. Illustration: EFFIS \/ Copernicus (The prognosis is updated regularly; this was downloaded 18 June 2025.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

EFFIS<\/a> is the European Forest Fire Information System. It supports the services in charge of the protection of forests against fires in the EU and neighboring countries. EFFIS also provides the European Commission services and the European Parliament with updated and reliable information on wildfires in Europe.<\/p>\n

The so-called Fire Database includes individual and detailed fire records provided by the EFFIS network countries. Currently, data in the database comprises nearly 2 million records provided by 22 countries. Based on this and other information, EFFIS offers several applications for monitoring forest fires and other relevant factors.<\/p>\n

\u201cNormal\u201d and \u201cabnormal\u201d wildfires<\/h2>\n

The wildfire season in Canada started in mid-May, and around 200 fires are still raging. Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated from their homes. Most of these fires were ignited by human activity, according to the province of Manitoba\u2019s Wildfire Services website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWildfires are a part of the natural ecosystem, but the fires in Canada are different \u2013 and not only because of the human factor. What we see now are fires burning in areas that are normally quite wet, with large, fast-growing forests. Due to drought, these forests are now drier than usual, yielding more available fuel for the fires. In areas which normally are quite dry, you don\u2019t accumulate so much fuel, because you have more frequent \u2013 but smaller \u2013 fires,\u201d explains Kaiser.<\/p>\n

In the past, it was more common for people to gather wood pieces and dry branches from the forest floor and burn them for heat and cooking. By doing so, they removed fuel for wildfires. Another means of keeping wildfires in check is prescribed burning in vulnerable areas.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn forests as large as in Canada, there is little to no forest management. They don\u2019t thin out the forest, they don\u2019t create firebreaks, there is no clearing of the forest floor. In a lot of European countries, among them my home country Greece, we do such forest management,\u201d says Evangeliou.<\/p>\n

The number of extreme wildfires is increasing<\/h2>\n

Most of Europe will never see fires of a similar size to the Canadian fires. There are simply no forests large enough, agree the two scientists.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe exception is Siberia, where there have been several fires of the same magnitude during the last ten years,\u201d says Evangeliou.<\/p>\n

According to him, Siberia has a similar ecosystem as Canada. It is at the same latitude and also has so-called boreal forests, that is, forests that grow in the High North. They are made up of species that can tolerate cold temperatures, such as spruce and fir. The name \u201cboreal\u201d derives from Boreas, the Greek god of winter, ice and the north wind.<\/p>\n

During the summer of 2018, there were more than 50 wildfires in Sweden, many close to the Norwegian border. Altogether, around 216 square kilometers<\/a> \u00a0were burning, and fire fighters from several countries worked together to put the fires out.<\/p>\n

For Scandinavia, this is quite large. But in comparison, more than 1350 square kilometers <\/a>\u00a0burned in Portugal last year, and over 150.000 square kilometers<\/a> in Canada back in 2023.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is a fact that the extreme wildfire risk has risen over the last 20 years,\u201d says Evangeliou. \u201cAccording to a recent study<\/a>, where the authors used 21\u2009years of satellite data to identify extreme wildfire events, they have more than doubled in frequency and magnitude between 2003 and 2023. In addition, 2023 had both the hottest global temperature on record and the most extreme wildfire intensities \u2013 so far.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
NASA\u2019s FIRMS (Fire Information for Resource Management Systems)<\/a> website shows a global fire map, with the option of choosing different time periods. The picture shows the last 24 hours, at 10.30 AM on June 18th, 2025.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to Copernicus Climate Change Service, Europe has been warming twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s. It is now the fastest-warming continent on Earth. Last year was the warmest ever, and there is little chance of 2025 slowing the race. Heatwaves are becoming more frequent and severe, with ever more widespread […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":58226,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_searchwp_excluded":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-newsarchive"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nilu.gnist.dev\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nilu.gnist.dev\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nilu.gnist.dev\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nilu.gnist.dev\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nilu.gnist.dev\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58212"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/nilu.gnist.dev\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58212\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58229,"href":"https:\/\/nilu.gnist.dev\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58212\/revisions\/58229"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nilu.gnist.dev\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nilu.gnist.dev\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nilu.gnist.dev\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nilu.gnist.dev\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}