Turkey, Greece, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Italy… Forest fires are raging this summer in Europe, around the Mediterranean.
And for good reason, this July is the second hottest month on record on the continent.
"If there are no mega-irons like those we have seen in the United States or Canada", begins Jean-Baptiste Filippi, researcher (CNRS), this heat wave means that a fire can be triggered by very low initial energy.
Hence the multitude of fires that firefighters have to face.
And if France is relatively spared so far, the summer season is still far from over.
We can hardly believe it, seen from France.
Yet we are living the third hottest month of July on record globally, tied with July 2020, said this Thursday the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), the Earth's satellite observation system. European Union.
And even the second hottest July on record in Europe.
If France is relatively spared to date, it is because "of this pocket of cold and humid air which detaches itself from the polar regions and which, due to the particular configuration of this summer, followed a trajectory the leading to Western Europe, explains Patrick Gallois, forecaster at Météo France.
It is the chance of the movements of atmospheric air masses, and this explains the mediocre temperatures for a month of July that we have been experiencing in recent weeks.
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Heat waves that dry up the vegetation
In other parts of Europe, on the other hand, you sweat. Particularly in South-Eastern Europe, plagued by heatwave episodes of rare intensity. Sometimes even for long weeks, like in Turkey or Cyprus. Surface temperatures - "that is to say the real quantity of radiant energy from the Earth, and not the temperature of the air in the meteorological sense of the term", specifies Clément Albergel, climate researcher at the 'ESA (the European Space Agency) - reached more than 50 ° C again last Monday, says Copernicus. The same map, published on July 2, already showed roughly the same situation.
And what about Greece?
She is hit by the worst heat wave in thirty years, alarmed her Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, last Monday always.
So much so that the mercury climbed to 45 ° C in parts of the country earlier this week.
This heat wave has as a corollary a wave of intense drought for the vegetation.
Add dry air and winds that facilitate propagation, and these are all the conditions for forest fires to multiply.
It is this context that we find at the moment on the Mediterranean rim.
From Turkey to Spain, via Greece and other Balkan countries (Albania, North Macedonia, Bulgaria) but also Italy.
No mega-irons ... but a multitude of fronts
Jean-Baptiste Filippi, researcher (CNRS) at the Environmental Sciences laboratory and coordinator of the FireCaster * program, distinguishes these fires "from the mega-fires that are currently being observed in Siberia or that have been seen, for example. , in the United States or in Australia ”. “A single one of these mega-plants can span 80,000 ha and become powerful enough to create its own weather system,” he says. They will heat the air so strongly that it will rise in altitude and create a convection cloud, which will completely change the winds in the region, potentially making lightning… ”
The fires currently affecting Europe are not of the same magnitude.
On the other hand, “this heat wave creates the conditions for a fire to be triggered by a very low initial energy,” explains Jean-Baptiste Filippi.
A butt, or even static electricity.
Obviously, the easier it is to light a fire, the greater the risk that they will multiply.
“An ordeal for the firefighters, who must deploy on several fronts at the same time.
"In July, we had 1,584 fires, against 953 in 2019", thus accounted for the Greek Deputy Minister of Civil Protection, Nikos Hardalias, at the beginning of the week.
And up to 240 fires per day have been recorded in recent days in Bulgaria.
A season still far from over
Put end to end, these fires have already ravaged a large number of natural spaces. According to the European Forest Fire Information System (Effis), 13,511 hectares have gone up in smoke since the start of the year in Greece. It is almost 95,000 hectares for Turkey. Italy, for its part, has recorded hundreds of fires in recent weeks, one of which, in western Sardinia, has devastated nearly 20,000 hectares.
2019 was already the worst year in this area in recent history: “more than 400,000 hectares (ha) of natural areas (have been) burned in Europe and a record number of protected natural areas have been affected by wildfires. forest ”, indicated the European Commission in a report published on October 30th. 2021 could end with a similar observation. "The summer season ** of forest fires in Europe is still far from over," recalls Jean-Baptiste Filippi. It really ends with the first big autumn rains, between October and the beginning of November. "
This still leaves time for France to be affected, which has, as we have said, been relatively spared, apart from this fire in the Aude, between July 24 and 25, which devastated the massif. Alaric, near Carcassonne, on 850 hectares.
“In the coming days, parameters will favor the occurrence of forest fires in France, warns Patrick Gallois.
Namely the return of the sun and the heat on the French Mediterranean rim but not only, which should dry out the superficial soils.
On the other hand, the wind should not blow strongly, which does not contribute to the propagation of fires if they are triggered.
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An increased risk with global warming?
Anyway, for Clément Albergel, we must expect to face more intense and more frequent forest fire seasons in Europe, as elsewhere, in the years to come. “ESA set up its Climate Change Initiative in 2010, a research and development program that looks at key climate indicators and their variability over long, precise, robust and global time series,” he begins. he. It has been realized that since the beginning of observations of the Earth from space in the 1980s and increasing, heat episodes are more and more frequent and last longer and longer. "
These higher temperatures promote the evapotranspiration of the plants.
As the vegetation dries up, it becomes more sensitive to the development of fires.
The World Meteorological Organization has already warned of the impact of this man-made climate change on an increase in the severity and number of fires.
“This over larger geographical areas with an extension of the fire season, specifies Météo France.
The frequency of fires could thus increase over more than 37.8% of the world territory, for the period 2010-2039, for a warming scenario of around 1.2 ° C.
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* Funded by the National Research Agency.
** “There are now two seasons of forest fires in Europe,” explains Jean-Baptiste Filippi.
That of summer and that of winter.
The most intense fires in Corsica over the past five years have thus occurred in winter, under the effect of very violent winds.
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