Meteorology applied to environmental management: process for the controlled use of fire in the field

Abstract

The insertion of restrictive measures to the fire use in the countryside in the form of fines, inspection agencies and others penalties has been applied since of the first Brazilian Forest Code creation. However, recent researchers shows that conscious management in the fire use is the first step to reduce the forest fires spreads and their consequences for society. As a result, this research aims to develop, in the Meteorology’s field, a tool that can be used as an aid to others combating fires methods by the inspections agencies.  For this, we analyzed the local rainfall variability considering the ocean-atmosphere mechanism that were active in the period from 2016 to 2019 in the Tomé Açu microregion. We calculated the moving average for three days groups to verify a safe rainfall average volume to create a management calendar indicating the safest time in each month to use fire in the field. We observed that the fires occurrence varies according to the type of cover and land use and with the ocean-atmosphere mechanism at work. Because of that, the September’s month had most relevance in this research. We used the 2020’s year to do the management calendar validation and we found that, in fact, it occurred within the expected groups indicating its efficiency to help fight forest fires.