Climatic Drivers of the Area Burned by Winter Wildfires in Northern Italy

This study explores the climatic drivers influencing the monthly Burned Area (BA) during the winter fire season (November–April) in northern Italy from 2008 to 2022 at 0.11° spatial resolution, providing an example of the current climatic dynamics affecting mountains. The results of the analysis indicated that the Alps and northern Apennines are mainly characterised by a winter fire regime. In these mountain areas, the Western Alps experienced the largest wildfire events, with return periods lower than 6 years. Parallel to BA data, 150 daily precipitation and temperature ground series were collected, converted to monthly scale, quality controlled, and gridded at the 0.11° spatial resolution. Several climatic indices were computed for precipitation, temperature, and droughts. To find the best BA predictors, we checked the correlations of BA with different temporal aggregations of climatic indices. For each pixel of the grid, we performed multilinear regression models using all possible combinations of the significant drivers. The selection of the best regression models was based on an out‐of‐sample procedure, and the model performance was tested by comparing the predicted BA with the observed data, estimating explained variance and correlation. While rising temperatures are often assumed to be the main driver of BA under climate change, our study revealed that low precipitation and water balance deficit from December to March played the most significant role in influencing BA during the winter fire season.