Rainfall analysis and its influence in forest fire occurrence in the Serra de Itabaiana National Park, Sergipe, Brazil

Abstract

The objective of this research was to verify the influence of the climatic variable precipitation in the forest fire occurrence at the National Park Serra de Itabaiana. For this propose, precipitation data for the Itabaiana county, and forest fire occurrence data inside the Park were analyzed for a period of 10 years (1999-2008). Initially, the precipitation data had been grouped using Analysis of Variance considering the months of the year and, after that, a Pearson’s coefficient of correlation was performed between precipitation data and number of registered forest fires. The “t” test of significance was applied to verify the correlation significance. The results showed that the months of November and December formed the group with lower annual precipitation values, while the months of May, June and July represented the group with highest values. Correlating the precipitation with the number of fires, a negative and significant correlation coefficient (r= -0.61, p= 0.03) was obtained. However, the driest months did not have the highest number of fire occurrences.