According to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center January was the fifth driest January on record in the contiguous United States.
More details from NOAA:
The average January national precipitation total was 1.32 inches, 0.90 inch below the 20th century average, ranking as the fifth-driest January on record and the driest since 2003. Dry conditions dominated much of the western and southern United States, with severe-to-exceptional drought engulfing much of California and Nevada. Numerous winter storms impacted the central and eastern U.S., bringing above-average snowfall but closer-to-average total precipitation for the month.
A report issued by Australia’s privately funded Climate Council has concluded that the number of professionals needed to fight bushfires in Australia will double by 2030. This major shift will be required by changes attributed to climate change. The 63-page report, titled Be Prepared: The Changing Climate and Australia’s Bushfire Threat, is entirely devoted to how climate change is already affecting wildland fires and how the rate of change is expected to increase over the next decades.
According to the report the most direct link between bushfires and climate change comes from the long-term trend towards a hotter climate. The change is increasing the frequency and severity of very hot days and driving up the likelihood of very high fire danger caused by weather. Changes in temperature and rainfall may also affect the amount and condition of fuel and the probability of lightning strikes.
The report lays out the current and predicted situation extremely well through the text and illuminating graphics. Click on the images here from the report to see larger versions.
I especially like the graphic above, which illustrates how four factors that affect wildland fire are being influenced by climate change
Ignitions: more lightning leads to more fires;
Fuel load will increase due to higher carbon dioxide levels, higher temperatures, and more rainfall. It could also decrease in some areas and vegetation types as a result of higher temperatures and less rain.
Fuel condition: higher temperatures and decreasing rainfall will increase fire activity while more rain in some areas will decrease fire activity.
Weather: higher temperatures will greatly increase fire activity.
Obviously it is a complex scenario with the factors having varying effects around the world where climate change affects local areas differently and vegetation types have specific responses to changes in weather.
The report concentrates on the effects in Australia, but also covers changes observed world-wide. As we have pointed out, in the United States there was an abrupt transition of fire activity in the mid-1980s with higher fire frequency, longer fire durations, and longer fire seasons. Fire frequency from 1987 to 2003 was nearly four times the average for 1970 through 1986. The area burned from 1987 to 2003 was more than six times that from 1970 to 1986, and the length of the fire season increased by about 2 months (Westerling et al., 2006).
The report discussed how fires affect carbon in the atmosphere:
Bushfires generate many feedbacks to the climate system, some of which can increase warming, while others decrease it. Emission of CO2 from bushfires generally represents a redistribution of existing carbon in the active carbon cycle from vegetation to the atmosphere.
As long as the vegetation is allowed to recover after a fire, it can reabsorb a very large fraction of the carbon released. By contrast, the burning of fossil fuels represents additional carbon inserted into the active land-atmosphere-ocean carbon cycle.
Increasing fire danger will make it more difficult to find times when planned prescribed fires are within the established prescriptions, which could result in fewer acres treated and higher fuel loads near wildland urban interfaces.
Government employees working for Oregon State University have determined that predicted increases in temperature and drought in the coming century may make it more difficult for conifers such as ponderosa pine to regenerate after major forest fires on dry, low-elevation sites, in some cases leading to conversion of forests to grass or shrub lands, a report suggests.
But even though you paid for it already by funding the research as a taxpayer, it will cost you $35.95 to purchase a copy of their findings, written by Erich Kyle Dodson and Heather Taylor Root of the University’s Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society in Corvallis, Oregon. The for-profit Elsevier corporation headquartered in the Netherlands published the paper. Wildfire Today supports open access to the results of taxpayer-funded scientific research. (UPDATE April 4, 2018: the research is now available for no additional charge.)
Dodson and Root concluded that moisture stress is a key limitation for conifer regeneration following stand-replacing wildfire, which will likely increase with climate change. This will make post-fire recovery on dry sites slow and uncertain. If forests are desired in these locations, more aggressive attempts at reforestation may be needed, they said.
The study, published in Forest Ecology and Management, was done in a portion of the Metolius River watershed in the eastern Cascade Range of Oregon, which prior to a 2002 fire was mostly ponderosa pine with some Douglas-fir and other tree species. The research area was not salvage-logged or replanted following the severe, stand-replacing fire.
“A decade after this fire, there was almost no tree regeneration at lower, drier sites,” said Erich Dodson, a researcher with the OSU Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society. “There was some regeneration at higher sites with more moisture. But at the low elevations, it will be a long time before a forest comes back, if it ever does.”
Similar situations may be found in many areas of the American West in coming decades, the researchers say, and recruitment of new forests may be delayed or prevented – even in climate conditions that might have been able to maintain an existing forest. While mature trees can use their roots to tap water deeper in the soil, competition with dense understory vegetation can make it difficult for seedlings to survive.
Openings in ponderosa pine forests created by wildfire have persisted for more than a century on harsh, south-facing slopes in Colorado, the researchers noted in their report. And fire severity is already increasing in many forests due to climate change – what is now thought of as a drought in some locations may be considered average by the end of the next century.
If trees do fail to regenerate, it could further reduce ecosystem carbon storage and amplify the greenhouse effect, the study said.
Restoration treatment including thinning and prescribed burning may help reduce fire severity and increase tree survival after wildfire, as well as provide a seed source for future trees, Dodson said. These dry sites with less resilience to stand-replacing fire should be priorities for treatment, if maintaining a forest is a management objective, the study concluded.
Higher-elevation, mixed conifer forests in less moisture-limited sites may be able to recover from stand-replacing wildfire without treatment, the researchers said.
Southern California researchers at Chapman University and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory are trying to develop a model that would use data from satellites to determine the amount of moisture in live vegetation. This is an important variable that planners and fire behavior analysts need when managing preparedness and predicting the spread of wildfires. The NASA funded work is in the preliminary stage. If the effort is successful it would be possible to obtain daily updates of live fuel moisture using information collected by two satellites, Terra and Aqua, the first passing overhead in the morning and the second in the afternoon.
When I was Captain at Descanso Station in southern California it was an official fuel moisture monitoring location. Every 10 to 14 days our engine crew would drive out on Viejas Grade Road and fill one-quart paint cans with clippings from chamise bushes. This is still being done all over the western United States, but with different species in other areas. In the basement back at the station we would weigh the unopened cans, then after removing the lids the cans would be placed in a convection oven overnight at moderate heat, and weighed again the next day. The entire building had the smell of cooked chamise. After accounting for the weight of the empty can, we would calculate the percent moisture that was lost. I plotted the data on a graph on a piece of paper along with the readings from the previous year, then made copies and snail-mailed them to the other fire stations on the District. Obviously this was before everyone had a computer on their desk and in their pocket.
Research: red stage needles do not recover moisture overnight
Preliminary research indicates that red stage lodgepole pine needles do not recover fuel moisture overnight, as occurs in other fine, dead surface fuels. The study was conducted on foliage from trees that had been attacked by mountain pine beetles. If this is confirmed it will have implications for predicting the rate of spread of fires in bug-killed stands.
Time Magazine: firefighting tactics in a warming world
The U.S. fights wildfires like it once fought wars—with overwhelming force aiming for unconditional surrender.
We do not entirely agree with Mr. Walsh. The federal land management agencies at one time DID fight fires with the overwhelming force they could muster, but budget cuts, a leadership vacuum, and timid initial attack policies have made that a distant memory. However some organizations still do have overwhelming force strategies, such as CAL FIRE.
Another “wildfire”
We take notice when the word “wildfire” is stolen and attached to something that has no connection to a fire that burns vegetation. There have been Wildfire songs before, but The Saturdays recorded a new version this summer.
Scientists expect fire risk in the U.S. to escalate by the end of the century
Hot and dry conditions lead to more fires. Those were the findings presented in 2012 by a team of researchers that used NASA satellite data and climate models to predict fire activity in the United States. Now, a new animation shows how dry conditions will cause different parts of the U.S., Canada and Mexico to experience an increased risk of fire by the end of the century. By mapping projected values for a measure of dryness known as the potential evaporation—a calculation that’s based on temperature, rainfall and wind speed estimates—scientists are able to interpret how fire activity will be influenced by future climates. Changes in dryness relative to 1980 levels are shown in the animation using colors, where reds represent an increase in dryness and blues represent a decrease. Watch the video to see how dry conditions are expected to spread across North America by the year 2100.
Five military Modular Airborne FireFighting System C-130 air tankers were released from fire suppression duty yesterday. Since the year’s initial activation June 11, MAFFS crews have flown 572 missions and made 535 drops using 1,375,981 gallons of fire retardant. That works out to 2,406 gallons per mission.
Granite Mountain Hotshots memorial items to be removed
Soon after 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots were killed on the Yarnell Hill Fire on June 30, mourners began placing memorial items on the fence surrounding their compound at the Prescott Fire Department. Now over two months later the city decided they have to do something with the hundreds of objects which include T-shirts, photos, posters, and other items. The City announced Thursday that the Fire Department and area volunteers would begin to remove them on Sept. 10.
Below is an excerpt from an article in the Daily Courier:
Now, officials say, it is time to begin packing away the items for preservation, and possible inclusion in a more permanent memorial in the future.
“Items that are able to be preserved will be temporarily stored until plans are finalized for the future permanent memorial,” the city’s new release stated.
City officials have noted that the outdoor elements have taken a toll on many of the items. Flowers, cardboard signs, and other perishable items were earlier removed. Many of the T-shirts from fire departments around the country have faded from dark-blue to gray.
Today on the NOW with Alex Wagner show there was a 10-minute discussion by a five-person panel about the current state of wildfires, how climate change affects wildfires, funding for fire management, and the risk of firefighters while protecting houses. We don’t get involved in politics here on Wildfire Today unless it directly affects fire management. But, even though the host mentions a particular political party once or twice, we believe this video has value here since it is the most in-depth nationally broadcast discussion about wildfires that we have seen.
Unfortunately the scientist who was asked to explain why we are “seeing violent, dangerous wildfires at what would seem to be historic rates”, was from NASA and his expertise appeared to be remote sensing, rather than wildfires or fire behavior.
We encourage you to comment on the video, but any that are strictly political and bash individual politicians or either party will be quickly deleted.
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