Forest fire occurrence and climate change in Canada

Datasets used in this analysis have been obtained from various provincial forest fire management agencies throughout Canada over several years (for numerous projects). The authors thank each of these organizations for their contribution and collaboration. The late Bernie Todd (Canadian Forest Service) was instrumental in assembling large portions of these provincial forest fire datasets and creating a common set of attributes that could be comparable. It was Bernie Todd who originally held discussions when this national analysis began. Fire weather streams based on Environment Canada weather station data come from previous work and were assembled with the grateful assistance of Walter Skinner of the Meteorological Service of Canada (Environment Canada). We also acknowledge the Canadian government’s Program for Energy Research and Development for support of this research.

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^A Temperature, relative humidity, 10 m open wind speed and 24-h accumulation of rainfall all recorded at 1200 hours Local Standard Time (LST).

^B This classification of the current and previous day’s total rainfall (R_T) into categories was based on a simple analysis of rainfall associated with lightning in an ecoregion in central Alberta and Saskatchewan (ecoregion 147, the Mid-Boreal Uplands) that we believed was representative of the boreal forest, using data from 1984-2004. The goal was to make a simpler classification system for rainfall because of the strongly skewed nature of the daily rainfall distribution. The rainfall levels simply corresponded to the 25th, 50th, 75th, 90th and 95th percentiles of daily rainfall that occurred on days with lightning in this region. This new variable, RCLASS, was thus classified as follows. R_CLASS = 0, RT ≤ 0.3; 1, 0.3 < R_T ≤ 0.9; 2, 0.9 < R_T ≤ 2.3; 3, 2.3 < R_T ≤ 4.8; 4, 4.8 < R_T ≤ 7.3; 5, R_T > 7.3. All values are in mm. Similar category breaks were found for neighbouring ecoregions.

^C Model results from B. M. Wotton (unpubl. data) from the implementation of the Wotton and Martell (2005) model into operations in the province of Ontario. Similar results were also found for models developed for the province of Saskatchewan using the same model form.

^D Historical DMC maximums were only exceeded in the Hadley 2090 general circulation model (GCM) scenario in the provinces of British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec and only on 0.08, 0.6 and 2.3% of ecoregion-days respectively and in the CCC 2090 GCM only in Ontario on 1.8% of ecoregion-days.