Fig. 6: Relationship between Fire Weather Index (FWI) and monthly fire activity across the conterminous U.S. | Nature Communications

Fig. 6: Relationship between Fire Weather Index (FWI) and monthly fire activity across the conterminous U.S.

From: Emissions from burned structures in wildfires as significant yet unaccounted sources of US air pollution

Fig. 6

Monthly total burned area of wildfires that involved structure burning (top row) and CO emissions from burned structures (bottom row) are plotted against monthly mean FWI, with each point representing a month during the 2000–2020 time period. Results are shown for the conterminous U.S. (A, D), the western U.S. (B, E), and the eastern U.S. (C, F). Point color indicates calendar month. Points are colored by month using a continuous color scale arranged to reflect the progression of the annual cycle, with the color of December and January appearing near close to each other. Spearman rank correlation coefficients (ρ) and p-values (p) quantify the strength and significance of the associations between FWI and fire outcomes. Spearman rank correlation is used due to non-linear relationships between compared variables and its robustness to outliers. All y-axes are log-scaled. Analysis is restricted to events with non-zero structure burning numbers.

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