The key role of extreme weather and climate change in the occurrence of exceptional fire seasons in south-central Chile

Abstract

Unprecedentedly large areas were burned during the 2016/17 and 2022/23 fire seasons in south-central Chile (34-39°S). These seasonal-aggregated values were mostly accounted for human-caused wildfires within a limited period in late January 2017 and early February 2023. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the meteorological conditions during these events, from local to hemispheric scales, and formally assess the contribution of climate change to their occurrence. To achieve this, we gathered monthly fire data from the Chilean Forestry Corporation and daily burned area estimates from satellite sources. In-situ and gridded data provided near-surface atmospheric insights, ERA5 reanalysis helped analyze broader wildfire features, high-resolution simulations were used to obtain details of the wind field, and large-ensemble simulations allowed the assessment of climate change's impact on extreme temperatures during the fires. This study found extraordinary daily burned area values (>65,000 ha) occurring under extreme surface weather conditions (temperature, humidity, and winds), fostered by strong mid-level subsidence ahead of a ridge and downslope winds converging towards a coastal low. Daytime temperatures and the water vapor deficit reached the maximum values observed across the region, well above the previous historical records. We hypothesize that these conditions were crucial in exacerbating the spread of fire, along with longer-term atmospheric processes and other non-climatic factors such as fuel availability and increasing human-driven ignitions. Our findings further reveal that climate change has increased the probability and intensity of extremely warm temperatures in south-central Chile, underscoring anthropogenic forcing as a significant driver of the extreme fire activity in the region.