Meteorological wildfire index (simplified WRI) for Extremadura, based on live data at Merida. Includes regional zoom map, 7-day evolution and sub-indices of temperature, humidity, wind and rainfall.
Extremadura operates a regional wildfire emergency plan coordinated with the Spanish Directorate-General for Civil Protection. During the official high-danger season, stubble burning, bonfires and spark-producing machinery in woodland and the perimeter strip are banned by default.
See also the national overview with the FWI of all 17 Spanish autonomous communities.
Extremadura combines dehesa, grassland and Mediterranean woodland with long, very hot summers. The risk spikes when temperatures above 40 °C are joined by a southwesterly and a prolonged drought; the sierras of northern Cáceres, with dense pine and scrub on slopes, are where the largest fires occur.
Three variables govern the rest: heat, low humidity and wind. Combined into a single indicator — atmospheric evaporative demand (reference ET0) above 4.5 mm a day, maximum gusts over 20 km/h and not a drop of rain — Extremadura averages 20 days a year of fire-prone weather. That is a middling figure, and it almost always arrives as episodes of several consecutive days rather than as isolated ones. The month with most such days is June, followed by July.
The thermometer passes 30 °C on about 90 days a year and, between June and August, the longest dry run averages 58 consecutive days without appreciable rain. Across those three months about 26 mm fall in total. 64 % of those days fall in summer and 4 % between December and March, a split that says a good deal about which kind of fire is normal here.
| Monthly mean | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Days ≥ 30 °C | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.3 | 5.1 | 14.5 | 28.1 | 27.4 | 11.0 | 3.5 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| Risk days | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.7 | 1.2 | 3.5 | 4.6 | 4.2 | 4.0 | 1.7 | 0.3 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| Rain (mm) | 56 | 47 | 75 | 70 | 36 | 19 | 3 | 4 | 36 | 101 | 77 | 68 |
Meteorology explains when a place can burn, not why it does. In Spain more than nine in ten wildfires are of human origin, between deliberate ignitions and negligence — agricultural burns that escape, machinery throwing sparks, campfires badly put out — and only a minority are caused by lightning. Nor do these figures cover the state of the fuel: two summers with identical heat behave very differently depending on how much rain fell in spring, because a wet spring grows grasses that later dry out and act as a fuse. The indicator also needs reading with one caution: being built on heat and dryness of the air, it captures the summer fire well and falls short on winter episodes of dry mountain wind, which on the Cantabrian coast and in the northwest burn with the thermometer at modest values.
The indicator above is meteorological: it combines temperature, relative humidity, wind and rainfall accumulated over the last 72 hours forecast for the reference point in Extremadura. It does not incorporate the real state of the vegetation or the drought history, and so it does not replace the official index each autonomous community publishes, nor the prohibitions in force during high-danger periods. Faced with a column of smoke, the number that matters is 112.
