EUBURN is an international initiative bringing together research expertise in fire and atmospheric sciences, meteorological centres and operational fire-fighting services to strengthen risk prevention, forecasting and management capabilities associated with wildfires in Southern Europe. EUBURN aims to create a structure for mutualizing operational and research observation resources, sharing data and developing common observation platforms and numerical tools in order to protect the European populations, property and ecosystems against wildfires.
An innovation of the project is the implementation of unprecedented field campaigns in France, Spain, Portugal and Italy to better understand the impacts of increasing wildfires in southern Europe on the continental surfaces and the atmosphere. The aim will be to obtain first scientific results on:
(i) location, intensity and spread of wildfires,
(ii) altitude of plume injection and transport,
(iii) the concentration and chemical composition of trace gases
(iv) the microphysical, chemical, optical and hygroscopic properties of biomass burning aerosol in the atmospheric column.
A first aircraft campaign EUBURN-SILEX (Smoke from european wILdfires EXperiment) is planned in summer 2025. The SAFIRE ATR-42 research aircraft will be based in Toulouse, South of France, to sample fires and atmospheric plumes in France, Spain and as far as North of Italy. A second field campaign, EUBURN-RISK, is planned in summer 2027. It will involve the deployment of multiple and synergistic field deployments from different measurement platforms: (i) the SAFIRE ATR-42 research aircraft, (ii) UAV and helicopters from civil security equipped with miniaturized sensors, (iii) satellite observations of fires and the atmosphere, (iv) several mobile ground-based platforms, and (v) reinforced observations from European atmospheric monitoring infrastructures. An important deliverable of the project will be unprecedented and publicly available observational products over the Southern Europe to promote data sharing between firefighting agencies, research teams and meteorological centers.
The new database will be used to evaluate and improve the earth observation and numerical prediction of the risks of wildfire spread and associated air quality and climate impacts, in order to minimize their negative environmental, economic and social effects. The work will implementing numerical tools for fire spread, emission, aging and transport of gas and aerosol species, air quality and climate change. EUBURN will also be a unique opportunity to assess the uncertainties in satellite retrievals of fires products and associated atmospheric plumes from various space missions.