Abstract

This study analyzes the climate change in Korea and its impact on the occurrence of forest fire events. The forest fire occurrences in Korea tend to concentrate around large cities. In addition, the spatial distribution of the forest fire occurrence seems to agree with local climate conditions. Though the occurrence of the forest fire shows strong interannual variation, it also exhibits a positive trend. Because the forest fire frequently occurs during early spring, we examined long term climate variability in Korea for the early spring seasons. The climate change in Korea generally has brought warmer, drier, and less precipitable conditions during the early spring. The changes of the atmospheric conditions provide favorable condition for the forest fire. The climate changes in Korea also depict distinct spatial variability according to the atmospheric variables. We compared the regional trend of the fire occurrence with the climate trends. The results show the sharpest growing in the forest fire occurrence over southwest of Korea. This study suggests that the decrease in the precipitation day might affect the sharp increasement of the forest fire occurrence in the southwest of Korea.

Keywords

• forest fire;
• global warming;
• climate change