open access Archives - Page 2 of 5

Researchers link smoke from fires to tornado intensity

Bill GabbertFebruary 4, 2015February 4, 2015Uncategorizedopen access, research, weather2 Comments

Some university and federal government scientists have concluded there is a link between smoke generated by vegetation fires in Central America and the intensity of tornadoes in the southeast United States. Their research was funded primarily by the federal government, but if you want a copy of their results it will cost you $38 — rather than making the government funded product available to taxpayers as an Open Access document.

Below are some highlights of their research.

Can smoke from fires intensify tornadoes?

“Yes,” say University of Iowa researchers, who examined the effects of smoke—resulting from spring agricultural land-clearing fires in Central America—transported across the Gulf of Mexico and encountering tornado conditions already in process in the United States.

The UI study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, examined the smoke impacts on a historic severe weather outbreak that occurred during the afternoon and evening of April 27, 2011. The weather event produced 122 tornadoes, resulted in 313 deaths across the southeastern United States, and is considered the most severe event of its kind since 1950.

The outbreak was caused mainly by environmental conditions leading to a large potential for tornado formation and conducive to supercells, a type of thunderstorm. However, smoke particles intensified these conditions, according to co-lead authors Gregory Carmichael, professor of chemical and biochemical engineering, and Pablo Saide, Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research (CGRER) postdoctoral fellow.

They say the smoke lowered the base of the clouds and increased wind shear, defined as wind speed variations with respect to altitude. Together, those two conditions increased the likelihood of more severe tornadoes. The effects of smoke on these conditions had not been previously described, and the study found a novel mechanism to explain these interactions.

“These results are of great importance, as it is the first study to show smoke influence on tornado severity in a real case scenario. Also, severe weather prediction centers do not include atmospheric particles and their effects in their models, and we show that they should at least consider it,” says Carmichael.

“We show the smoke influence for one tornado outbreak, so in the future we will analyze smoke effects for other outbreaks on the record to see if similar impacts are found and under which conditions they occur,” says Saide. “We also plan to work along with model developers and institutions in charge of forecasting to move forward in the implementation, testing and incorporation of these effects on operational weather prediction models.”

In order to make their findings, the researchers ran computer simulations based upon data recorded during the 2011 event. One type of simulation included smoke and its effect on solar radiation and clouds, while the other omitted smoke. In fact, the simulation including the smoke resulted in a lowered cloud base and greater wind shear.

Future studies will focus on gaining a better understanding of the impacts of smoke on near-storm environments and tornado occurrence, intensity, and longevity, adds Carmichael, who also serves as director of the Iowa Informatics Initiative and co-director of CGRER.

Paper co-authors are Scott Spak ofthe UI Departments of Urban and Regional Planning and Civil and Environmental Engineering; Bradley Pierce and Andrew Heidinger of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Satellite and Information Service Center for Satellite Applications and Research; Jason Otkin and Todd Schaack of the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Arlindo da Silva of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; and Meloë Kacenelenbogen and Jens Redemann of NASA.

The paper “Central American biomass burning smoke can increase tornado severity in the U.S.” can be found online [for a fee of up to $38].

The research was funded by grants from NASA, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, National Institutes of Health, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Fulbright-CONICYT scholarship program in Chile.

Researchers: insects and drought more of a threat to forests than wildfires

Bill GabbertJanuary 15, 2015Uncategorizedbeetles, drought, open access, research

custer engine highland fire — Custer FD’s Engine 6 at the Highland Fire west of Custer, SD, July 1, 2012. Photo by Bill Gabbert.

New research shows that the most significant current threat to western dry forests is from insect outbreaks and droughts, not wildfires; and historically abundant small trees offer the greatest hope for forest survival and recovery after these events. Dry forests are low-elevation western forests with tall pines. The study used government records of insect and wildfire damage to compare current threats to dry forests and used records from land surveys conducted in the late-1800s to understand how dry forests persisted for thousands of years in spite of insect outbreaks, droughts, and fires. These forests persisted, this study suggests, by having both young and old trees that together provided bet-hedging.

Data on recent threats to dry forests used government maps of insect outbreaks and wildfires from 1999-2012 across 64 million acres of western dry forests or 80% of the total dry-forest area. “When comparing the rates of insect outbreaks and wildfire over the past fourteen years, we were surprised to discover insect outbreaks impacted 5 to 7 times the area that wildfire did.” said Dr. Mark Williams, a co-author of the study and recent PhD graduate of the University of Wyoming’s Program in Ecology. “In contrast, restoration efforts to increase resilience of dry forests to changing climate focus primarily on threats from wildfire. Our work suggests that impacts from insect pests should be considered with greater weight when formulating restoration prescriptions.”

To understand how forests were resilient to multiple disturbances in the past, the researchers utilized historical data which included 45,171 tree sizes measured along 13,900 section-lines traversed by land surveyors in about 4.2 million acres of dry forests in Arizona, California, Colorado, and Oregon in the late-1800s.

“The late-1800s land surveys provide us with a spatially extensive and detailed view of how these dry forests persisted through unpredictable episodes of insect outbreaks, droughts, and wildfires” said Dr. William Baker, a co-author of the study and Professor Emeritus in the Program in Ecology and Department of Geography at the University of Wyoming. “What we see from the surveys is that dry forests historically had many large trees, that often survived wildfires, but even more small trees that were less prone to be killed during insect outbreaks and droughts. The combination of abundant youth and older trees provided bet-hedging insurance that allowed these forests to survive and recover regardless of whether an insect outbreak, drought, or wildfire occurred. These unpredictable events may increase with global warming.”

The study’s findings suggest current programs that remove most small trees to lower the intensity of wildfires in dry forests and restore large trees lost to logging, may reduce forest resilience to the larger threats from insect outbreaks and droughts. “Using historical forests as a guide, our study suggests we may want to modify our restoration and management programs so they do not put all our eggs in one basket, but instead hedge our bets by keeping both large trees and abundant small ones” said Dr. Baker.

Key findings:

Over the last fourteen years, insect outbreaks have impacted 5 to 7 times more dry forests than have wildfires.
Historically, dry forests had large trees, but were numerically dominated by small trees, 52-92% of total trees.
The variable structure of past forests provided bet-hedging insurance against multiple disturbances and continued persistence. Removing most small trees for modern restoration treatments may reduce the resilience of these forests.

The study was published Open Access online in the international scientific journal, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution and is freely available to download on their website.

New research outlines global threat of smoldering peat fires

Bill GabbertJanuary 12, 2015January 12, 2015Uncategorizedclimate change, open access, peat, research

“The scary thing is future climate change may … dry out peatlands. If peatlands become more vulnerable to fire worldwide, this will exacerbate climate change in an unending loop.” Guido R. van der Werf

Six researchers have written a paper about how climate change is expected to increase the number of peat fires worldwide. This is disturbing for a number of reasons, including the health effects of the additional smoke that humans must breathe, and the additional carbon in the atmosphere may “exacerbate climate change in an unending loop.”

The researchers — Merritt R. Turetsky, Brian Benscoter, Susan Page, Guillermo Rein, Guido R. van der Werf, and Adam Watts — all work for universities. Even though the funding was supplied by five government agencies, if you want to read their paper at Nature Geoscience it will cost you between $5 and $32. Open Access is apparently not a priority for the universities and government agencies that are responsible for this important taxpayer funded research. The agencies that funded the research, other than the universities that employ the scientists, are National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, The European Research Council, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Desert Research Institute’s Division of Atmospheric Sciences (the environmental research arm of the Nevada System of Higher Education).

Government agencies should not fund research unless there is a guarantee that the results will be immediately, freely, and easily available on the internet.

Below is an article about their findings, supplied by the Desert Research Institute, the environmental research arm of the Nevada System of Higher Education, the employer of Mr. Watts.

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The natural disaster plays out like a movie script – ash falling from the sky, thick smoke shutting down airports and businesses across the globe, and uncontrollable fires burning for days and weeks. But this is not from a script; rather, it is a vivid description of a future climate change scenario in which the Earth’s peat-rich regions become more susceptible to drying and burning.

New research published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience, co-authored by Adam Watts, a fire ecologist at Nevada’s Desert Research Institute (DRI) and deputy director of DRI’s Climate, Ecosystems, Fire and Applications Program, outlines the threat of drying peatlands (also known as mires) across the globe and their increased vulnerability to fire and carbon loss.

Peatlands – which make up around three-percent of the Earth’s land surface and store approximately 25-percent of the world’s soil carbon – are deposits of plant material and organic matter mixed with soil that is too wet to support high levels of decomposition. Peatlands are found on all seven continents.

Already the largest fires on Earth in terms of their carbon footprint, these smoldering fires burn through thick layers of peat, built up over thousands of years, which blanket the ground in ecosystems ranging from the tropics to the arctic.

“When people picture a forest fire, they probably think of flames licking up into tree tops, and animals trying to escape,” said the study’s lead author Merritt Turetsky, a professor of Integrative Biology at University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. “But peat fires tend to be creeping ground fires. They can burn for days and weeks, even under relatively wet conditions. They lack the drama of flames, but they produce a lot of smoke.”

That smoke contains large amounts of carbon and makes peat fires dangerous to human health. It can worsen air quality and even trigger asthma and other respiratory problems.

“In addition to the amount of carbon released, the types of emissions also can make smoldering fires of greater concern than fires where most of the combustion takes place in flames,” said Watts, who is studying the emissions from burning peat and many other types of organic fuels with his DRI colleagues to determine their potential effects in the atmosphere and on our global climate.

“Peat fires are an example of wildfires having effects far beyond the areas where they occur, and these effects can last for a very long time,” he added.

Turetsky and former University of Guelph post-doctoral researcher Brian Benscoter teamed up with temperate and tropical fire scientists to summarize what is known about peat fires, from massive lightning-ignited fires that burn large areas of the boreal region to tropical fires often triggered by human activity.

“The tropical peatlands in Southeast Asia are a clear demonstration of how human activity can alter the natural relationships between ecosystems and fire,” explained Susan Page, a University of Leicester professor and co-author on the study. “Tropical peatlands are highly resistant to natural fires, but in recent decades, humans have drained peatlands for plantation agriculture. People cause the deep layers of peat to dry out, and also greatly increase the number of fire ignitions. It’s a double threat.”

This causes a host of problems, including health issues, airport and school closures, and political tensions.

The paper concludes that almost all peat-rich regions will become more susceptible to drying and burning with a changing climate. The authors also note that the ecology of peat fires and the role of peat fires in long-term Earth system processes need to be explored more thoroughly in future research.

“Thanks to satellite data, we are fully aware of the vast scale of burning in drained peatlands, mostly in Indonesia,” said co-author Guido van der Werf, a professor at Amsterdam’s VU University. “The scary thing,” Werf added,” is future climate change may actually do the same thing: dry out peatlands. If peatlands become more vulnerable to fire worldwide, this will exacerbate climate change in an unending loop.”

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, The European Research Council, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Desert Research Institute’s Division of Atmospheric Sciences.

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More information about peat fires at Wildfire Today.

Researchers recommend amount of fire clearance around structures

Bill GabbertNovember 26, 2014November 25, 2014Uncategorizeddefensible space, open access, research, WUI15 Comments

Researchers have concluded that the most effective fire clearance or defensible space around structures, to reduce the chances of them burning in a wildfire, is between 16 and 58 feet.

Below is an excerpt from the abstract of a paper written by Alexandra D. Syphard, Teresa J. Brennan, and Jon E. Keeley, submitted to a journal September 16, 2014.

We analysed the role of defensible space by mapping and measuring a suite of variables on modern pre-fire aerial photography for 1000 destroyed and 1000 surviving structures for all fires where homes burned from 2001 to 2010 in San Diego County, CA, USA. Structures were more likely to survive a fire with defensible space immediately adjacent to them. The most effective treatment distance varied between 5 and 20 m (16–58 ft) from the structure, but distances larger than 30 m (100 ft) did not provide additional protection, even for structures located on steep slopes.

Two of the three authors are public employees, so the taxpayers already paid for this research. However, if you want a copy of The role of defensible space for residential structure protection during wildfires, it will cost you $25.

More about Open Access to research that is paid for by taxpayers.

Wednesday morning one-liners

Bill GabbertOctober 1, 2014November 28, 2014Uncategorizedaccident, arson, Australia, beetles, BIA, California, open access, Oregon, Philippines, railroad, report, research, South Dakota, Warm Springs, Washington

Engine rollover, Warm Springs, Oregon, July 18, 2014.

*The Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center has published a report on a BIA engine that rolled over near Warm Springs, Oregon, July 18, 2014. Two people were injured, one seriously. The LLC says more than 50 fire vehicles have rolled over in the last 10 years.

*A Colorado artist has created a work consisting of rectilinear pillars suspended from the ceiling, each measuring nine feet tall, meant to convey the idea of a wildfire.

*A man spotted running from the 50-acre Foothill Fire in Ventura, California was arrested on suspicion of setting the blaze.

*Fire officials in Washington state suspect an arsonist is responsible for igniting 23 fires in less than two weeks. Most of them have been vegetation fires.

*A firefighting vehicle in Australia has been outfitted with drop-down steel wheels so that it can follow a steam-powered train, putting out wildfires started by the steam engine.

*In other news from Australia, a Senator gave a speech, titled, Thank you For Smoking, praising nicotine fiends for their $8 billion a year contribution to the economy. He said he did the math: Last year smokers cost the health care system $320 million and another $150 million in bushfire control.

*Researchers have found that “recent (2001–2010) beetle outbreak severity was unrelated to most field measures of subsequent fire severity, which was instead driven primarily by extreme burning conditions (weather) and topography.” Unfortunately, to read the article, researched and published by government employees, it will cost you $10 for two days of access. If the researchers, Brian J. Harvey, Daniel C. Donato, and Monica G. Turner, are going to hide the results of their taxpayer-funded research behind a pay wall, what’s the point in hiring researchers? Support Open Access.

*Firefighters are on alert in the Philippines for wildfires that may start from an eruption of the Mayon volcano.

*Firefighters are on lessened alert in the Black Hills after the area received two to five inches of rain over the last few days.

*California has burned through its wildfire-fighting budget — $209 million — just as it faces what is historically the worst of the fire season.

A “Climate Change and Wildfire” research paper that you can’t read

Bill GabbertFebruary 23, 2014August 25, 2019Uncategorizedclimate change, open access, research6 Comments

Federal employees working for the United States Forest Service and the citizens of the United States have published the results of research done on behalf of the taxpayers, titled Climate Change and Wildfire. If you want to read it you will have to pay $35.95 to the for-profit Elsevier corporation headquartered in the Netherlands that published the paper. It was written by research meteorologists Yongqiang Liu and Scott Goodrick from the Forest Service’s Southern Research Station (SRS) and Warren Heilman from the Northern Research Station. The concept of Open Access to taxpayer-funded research still has a long way to go in the U.S. Forest Service.

Below are some highlights of the research, according to the USDA Forest Service’s Southern Research Station. We will have to take their word for it. The agency suggests that “for the full text of the article” go to the Elsevier web site, where you have to pay $35.95.

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(UPDATE at 11:44 a.m. MST, February 24, 2014)

After we reached out to her and left a message, we received a phone call today from Zoë Hoyle, the author of the press release about the research that was issued May 20, 2013. She said the link to the full text of the article which directed web site visitors to the pay wall was an error. She said the usual practice of USFS researchers is to place their results on http://www.treesearch.fs.fed.us/ where they can be read at no charge, but that still has not taken place. Ms. Hoyle said, however, that the paper should be on treesearch by the end of this week.

In the meantime, one of our readers, Liz H., used Google Scholar to find a copy of it at firescience.gov. Thanks Liz.

And thanks go out also to Ms. Hoyle for correcting the oversight. We are pleased to hear that the usual practice of the USFS is to publish their research on treesearch, an open access format on the internet.

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(UPDATE at 1:54 p.m. MST, February 24, 2014)

Ms. Hoyle contacted us again to let us know that the USFS was able to expedite the placement of the research paper on treesearch, where it can now be viewed without having to pay the company from the Netherlands $35.95.

Here is one of the illustrations from the paper, about the interactions between the climate and fire.

Below is an excerpt from the May 20, 2013 USFS news release about the research.

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“While research has historically focused on fire-weather interactions, there is increasing attention paid to fire-climate interactions,” says Liu, lead author and team leader with the SRS Center for Forest Disturbance Science. “Weather, the day-to-day state of the atmosphere in a region, influences individual fires within a fire season. In contrast, when we talk about fire climate, we’re looking at the statistics of weather over a certain period. Fire climate sets atmospheric conditions for fire activity in longer time frames and larger geographic scales.”

Wildfires impact atmospheric conditions through emissions of gases, particles, water, and heat. Some of the article focuses on radiative forcing from fire emissions. Radiative forcing refers to the change in net (down minus up) irradiance (solar plus longwave) at the tropopause, the top of the troposphere where most weather takes place.

Smoke particles can generate radiative forcing mainly through scattering and absorbing solar radiation (direct radiative forcing), and modifying the cloud droplet concentrations and lifetime, and hence the cloud radiative properties (indirect radiative forcing). The change in radiation can cause further changes in global temperatures and precipitation.

“Wildfire emissions can have remarkable impacts on radiative forcing,” says Liu.

“During fire events or burning seasons, smoke particles reduce overall solar radiation absorbed by the atmosphere at local and regional levels. At the global scale, fire emissions of carbon dioxide contribute substantially to the global greenhouse effect.”

Other major findings covered in the synthesis include:

The radiative forcing of smoke particles can generate significant regional climate effects, leading to lower temperatures at the ground surface.
Smoke particles mostly suppress cloud formation and precipitation. Fire events could lead to more droughts.
Black carbon, essentially the fine particles of carbon that color smoke, plays different roles in affecting climate. In the middle and lower atmosphere, its presence could lead to a more stable atmosphere. Black carbon plays a special role in the snow-climate feedback loop, accelerating snow melting.

Land surface changes may be triggered that also play into future effects. “Wildfire is a disturbance of ecosystems,” says Liu. “Besides the atmospheric impacts, wildfires also modify terrestrial ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration, soil fertility, grazing value, biodiversity, and tourism. The effects can in turn trigger land use changes that in turn affect the atmosphere.”

The article concludes by outlining issues that lead to uncertainties in understanding fire-climate interactions and the future research needed to address them.

Full text of the article: [note from Bill. We deleted the link to the for-profit web site with the pay wall]

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