The influence of solar activities on occurrence of the forest fires in south Europe

Abstract

In mid-July 2012, hundreds of fires spread over forest stands in the south of Europe. Considering available satellite and meteorological data we have tried to determine a method using analogy, whether these fires were preceded by the intensified solar activity. The justification of this approach lies in the belief that it is impossible by direct or indirect activity of man to set fire at the same time to the sites that are geographically separated. In this paper we have tried to test the hypothesis claiming that charged particles coming to us from the Sun may be responsible for the number of forest fires. Unlike some other situations when the potential explanation could be a sudden influx of the protons of different energy ranges, in our study, there are electrons as carriers of the potential explanation. Many previous studies results have shown that there is statistically significant relationship between the processes on the Sun and certain movements of air masses in the atmosphere our planet. The presented results in this paper of the correlation relationships between the mean hourly flows of electrons and the mean hourly air temperatures in Belgrade and Rome and the analysis of the synoptic situation as a function of the suggested model so far, indicate that the number of fires that were occurring more than a week, from July 15, 2012, in the south of Europe, were caused by electrons coming from the Sun.