Seasonal Fire probability forecast for South American Protected Areas and Brazilian municipalities

Timely spatially explicit warning of areas with high fire occurrence probability is an important component of strategic plans to prevent and monitor fires within South American (SA) Protected Areas (PAs). In this study, we present a five-level alert system, which combines both climatological and anthropogenic factors, the two main drivers of fires in SA. The alert levels are: High Alert, Alert, Attention, Observation and Low Probability. The trend in the number of active fires over the past three years and the accumulated number of active fires over the same period were used as indicators of intensification of human use of fire in that region, possibly associated with ongoing land use/land cover change (LULCC). An ensemble of temperature and precipitation gridded output from the GloSea5 Seasonal Forecast System was used to indicate an enhanced probability of hot and dry weather conditions that combined with LULCC favour fire occurrences. Alerts from this system were first issued in August 2020, for the period ranging from August to October (ASO) 2020. Since August 2021, data has been generated and made available on a monthly basis.