Detecting long-range correlations in fire sequences with Detrended fluctuation analysis

The spatial–temporal power-law distributions are found in many natural systems, which have self-similarity and fractal behavior. By analyzing the time series of such systems, we could expect to explore and understand the underlying mechanisms. In this paper, the Detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) is used to analyze the long-range correlations of forest and urban fires in Japan and China. It is found that the interevent time series of both forest and urban fires have the persistent long-range power-law correlations, and they all have two scaling exponents, α1 and α2, which are both bigger than 0.5 and smaller than 1.0, despite the different regions and countries. For forest fires, 0.61<α1<0.73,0.87<α2<0.98 and for urban fires, 0.52<α1<0.61,0.59<α2<0.88. The result suggests that fires have self-similarity characteristics. The occurrence of forest fires may have connection with the weather fluctuations, which have significant effects on the ignition and have the similar temporal correlations. It is shown that the interval sequences of urban fires closely resemble that of white noise in small timescale, and the correlations are weaker than that of forest fires. Human behavior and human density may affect the long-range correlation in some way. This seems to be helpful to understand the complexity of fire system in temporal aspect.