The benefits of emergency rescue and reanalysis data in decadal storm damage assessment studies

摘要

Studying changes in storm-induced forest damage in Finland has not beenpossible previously due to the lack of continuous, long series of impactdata. We overcome this by combining emergency rescue data from the Finnishrescue services "PRONTO" (2011-) with ERA-Interim reanalysis data of windgusts and soil temperatures to define exceedance thresholds for potentialforest damage days. These thresholds were applied as a proxy for the period1979–2013 in order to study the spatial and decadal characteristics offorest damage in Finland due to windstorms.The results indicated that the area most impacted by potential forest damagewas the south-western part of Finland along the coast, with 1–10 damagingstorm cases per year. A decadal examination highlighted a lull period in thenumber of potential forest damage days during the 1990s compared to the1980s and 2000s, albeit no trend was evident.The inclusion of emergency rescue data allowed us for the first time toestimate the spatial distribution and decadal variations of potential forestdamage days due to windstorms in Finland. The results achieved willencourage further development of thresholds for potential forest damage byincluding additional data sources and applying them to future climate scenarios.