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Three universities receive $20 million to make fuel management data more usable for managers

Bill GabbertFebruary 25, 2022UncategorizedArizona, Colorado, fuel management, New Mexico, research7 Comments

Will also evaluate outcomes to see what works

Cameron Peak Fire smoke plume at Boyd Lake, InciWeb, Oct. 14, 2020.

In an effort to improve forest resilience and reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires in the Interior West, three organizations are receiving a total of $20 million from the U.S. government.

The funds are part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed by Congress with bipartisan support and signed by President Joe Biden in 2021, which will go to enhancing key systems and processes to mitigate the impact of forest fires.

The award will be made to the Southwest Ecological Restoration Institutes (SWERI) which includes the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute (CFRI), Highlands University’s New Mexico Forest and Watershed Restoration Institute, and Northern Arizona University’s Ecological Restoration Institute. The SWERI were created through congressional legislation passed in 2004 which charged the three institutes with promoting adaptive management practices to restore the health of fire-adapted forest and woodland ecosystems of the Interior West.

The Colorado Forest Restoration Institute is housed in the Department of Forest and Rangeland Stewardship in CSU’s Warner College of Natural Resources.

The three institutes will work collaboratively on three key components with the funding, to:

Develop a national database of existing data on fuel treatments and wildfires,
Work with managers, planners, and policymakers to facilitate use and applications of the data, and,
Research outcomes of forest management and wildfires to learn what works.

“The work we’re charged with developing under the Infrastructure measure will create opportunities for land and fire managers, scientists and community stakeholders to co-produce actionable knowledge to lessen the harmful effects of wildfire events to people and the environment,” said Tony Cheng, director of the CFRI and professor in the Department of Forest and Rangeland Stewardship.

Land and fire managers and community stakeholders in Boulder County huddled around CFRI geospatial mapping products aided by CFRI’s science and outreach staff. Photo by Tony Cheng.

According to Cheng, the new funding aligns with the CSU land-grant mission and offers an opportunity to grow CFRI’s existing data management, application, and research efforts to be accessible for a wider audience.

The funding is prompted by climate change-driven increases in fire activity and fire season length, continued development in the wildland-urban interface, and interactions between fire and disturbances like pest and pathogen disturbance.

The CFRI recently completed a statewide database of forest vegetation management and wildfires for Colorado, complementing a similar effort for New Mexico and southern Colorado led by the New Mexico Forest and Watershed Restoration Institute. The data serve as a foundation for the decision support tools and collaborative processes that CFRI deploys around the state and throughout the Interior West. The national database will be developed using similar types of data across the country.

The data are only the starting point, said Brett Wolk, one of CFRI’s assistant directors. Making data meaningful for land and fire managers, scientists, policymakers, and community stakeholders working in their specific places is a critical function the institutes excel at and is called out in the Infrastructure provisions.

“Unless the data is situated within a social context where people can understand how it applies to their work, all the best data and science in the world won’t change decisions or outcomes on the ground,” said Wolk. “That’s why SWERI works to co-develop solutions with partners and empower decisions that are science informed but also locally relevant.”

A third component of the funding is researching outcomes of past treatments to improve future decisions. This will build on deep research expertise at the Arizona and Colorado institutes, exemplified by a recent CFRI co-led publication and accompanying podcast evaluating accomplishments of the Forest to Faucets partnership aimed at protecting Denver’s water supply from devastating wildfires.

The challenge, Wolk said, is applying the collective institutes’ knowledge and expertise across the entire U.S. At the same time, there is an opportunity for other states to benefit from the collective knowledge across the institutes.

“It’s a massive opportunity to help fast-track implementation of what’s working in forest and fire management. But research also shows big gaps in who has access to and contributes knowledge towards these forestry data and decision-making processes. If we can increase the application of science, while making incremental change to expand equity of ideas and resources among wider audiences, those will be our measures of success.”

From Colorado State University

Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Gerald.

BC Wildfire Service moves to a year-round workforce

Bill GabbertFebruary 24, 2022UncategorizedBritish Columbia, budget, Canada, pay3 Comments

The agency employs approximately 1,000 wildland firefighters

BC Wildfire Service 2022 budget — Minister of Finance Selina Robinson presented the 2022 budget for British Columbia on February 22, 2022.

The government of British Columbia intends to move to a year-round workforce for the Wildfire Service in the next fiscal year that begins April 1. In a February 22 presentation Minister of Finance Selina Robinson said, “$145 million in new funding will strengthen B.C.’s emergency management and wildfire services. The BC Wildfire Service will shift from a reactive to a proactive approach by moving to a year-round workforce that will deliver all pillars of emergency management: prevention and mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery.”

The BC Wildfire Service employs approximately 1,000 wildland firefighters each year.

The new budget will allow improvements of the public alerting system for wildfires and help support people and communities during climate-related events.

An additional $98 million will fund wildfire prevention work and maintain forest service roads used to respond to forest fires.

The budget also includes $210 million to support community climate change preparedness and emergency management, including through the FireSmart program, the Community Emergency Preparedness Fund, and Indigenous-led emergency management priorities. It will support communities and First Nations to build more resilient dikes and map floodplains.

Researchers find the current Western drought is worst in 1,200 years

Bill GabbertFebruary 24, 2022Uncategorizedclimate, climate change, research, weather

It is intensified by climate change

low water level drought Lake Powell, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area — The public launch ramp at Antelope Point in late March, 2021 at Lake Powell, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. NPS photo.

New research published this month shows that the current drought in the Western United States is the worst seen in data going back to the year 800. Scientists developed estimates of precipitation during previous centuries using tree-ring reconstruction and found 2000–2021 was the driest 22-year period in the last 1,200 years.

Precipitation, temperature, and vapor pressure anomaly, 2000 to 2021 — Observed climate anomalies. Anomalies in water-year (WY: October–September) (a) precipitation total, (b) temperature, and (c) vapour-pressure deficit (VPD). Maps on left show the average WY anomaly during 2000–2021. Yellow box: Southwestern North America (SWNA) study region. Anomalies are relative to 1950–1999. Time series on right show regionally averaged WY anomalies in SWNA (black) annually and as (red) 22-year running means visualized on the final year in each 22-year period. Geographic boundaries in maps were accessed through Matlab 2020a. From the paper.

Since the year 2000, southwestern North America (SWNA) has been unusually dry due to low precipitation totals and heat, punctuated most recently by exceptional drought in 2021. From 2000 to 2021, mean water-year (October– September) SWNA precipitation was 8.3 percent below the 1950–1999 average and temperature was 0.91 °C above average.

In summer of 2021, water levels at Lakes Mead and Powell, both on the Colorado River, reached their lowest levels on record, triggering unprecedented restrictions on Colorado River usage, in part because the 2-year naturalized flow out of Colorado River’s upper basin in water-years 2020–2021 was likely the lowest since at least 1906. Despite an active North American monsoon in 2021, the United States Drought Monitor classified more than 68 percent of the western United States as under extreme or exceptional drought for nearly all of July–October, 2021.

Soil moisture, 800 to 2021 — Extended drought events. Summer soil moisture anomalies, expressed as standard deviations from the 800–2021 mean (σ), during the longest 8 extended drought events during the 800–2021 study period. The pink background bounds the years of each extended drought event. The horizontal dotted black line represents the 800–2021 mean. For the first 7 droughts shown, soil moisture anomalies come from our tree-ring reconstruction. For the final drought (2000–2021), anomalies come from our observation-based record. From the paper.

The researchers concluded that anthropogenic climate change accounts for 42 percent of the SWNA soil moisture anomaly in 2000–2021 and 19 percent in 2021.

Drought can have a very significant effect on wildland fire behavior. It affects vapor pressure deficit (VPD), soil moisture, relative humidity, and moisture in live and dead vegetation, or fuels. VPD is an absolute measure of the moisture deficit of the atmosphere and is more closely related to water stress on vegetation than relative humidity.

Soil moisture is a particularly important integrator of drought. Of all 22-year periods since 800, only two (1130–1151 and 1276–1297) contained more years with negative soil moisture anomalies than the 18 observed during 2000–2021.

The authors wrote that the 22-year long current drought is highly likely to continue through a 23rd year.

Percent of US with extreme or exceptional drought, 2000 to 2022 — Extreme and exceptional drought in the western United States (US). Weekly percentage of western continental United States (west of 103°W) classified by the United States Drought Monitor (USDM) as under extreme or exceptional drought from January 1, 2000 to December 28, 2021. Calculations were made form weekly shapefiles of USDM drought classifications, available at https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/DmData/GISData.aspx as of January 9, 2022. The USDM is developed by the National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). From the paper.

The research was conducted by A. Park Williams, Benjamin I. Cook, and Jason E. Smerdon.

Extreme wildfires may increase 14 percent by 2030, United Nations warns

Bill GabbertFebruary 23, 2022February 23, 2022Uncategorizedclimate change, study8 Comments

Airport Fire near Bishop, Calif. — Airport Fire near Bishop, California Feb. 16, 2022. CAL FIRE photo.

Climate change and land-use change are projected to make wildfires more frequent and intense, with a global increase of extreme fires of up to 14 percent by 2030, 30 percent by the end of 2050, and 50 percent by the end of the century, according to a new report by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and GRID-Arendal.

The study calls for a radical change in government spending on wildfires, shifting their investments from reaction and response to prevention and preparedness.

In the report, wildfire is defined as “an unusual or extraordinary free-burning vegetation fire which may be started maliciously, accidently, or through natural means, that negatively influences social, economic, or environmental values”.

The study, Spreading like Wildfire: The Rising Threat of Extraordinary Landscape Fires (117 MB), finds an elevated risk even for the Arctic and other regions previously unaffected by wildfires in recent centuries. The publication calls on governments to adopt a new “Fire Ready Formula”, with two-thirds of spending devoted to planning, prevention, preparedness, and recovery, with one third left for response. Currently, direct responses to wildfires typically receive over half of related expenditures, while planning receives less than one per cent.

To prevent fires, the authors call for a combination of data and science-based monitoring systems with indigenous knowledge and for a stronger regional and international cooperation.

“Current government responses to wildfires are often putting money in the wrong place. Those emergency service workers and firefighters on the frontlines who are risking their lives to fight forest wildfires need to be supported”, said Inger Andersen, UNEP Executive Director. “We have to minimize the risk of extreme wildfires by being better prepared: invest more in fire risk reduction, work with local communities, and strengthen global commitment to fight climate change”.

Wildfires disproportionately affect the world’s poorest nations. With an impact that extends for days, weeks and even years after the flames subside:

· People’s health is directly affected by inhaling wildfire smoke, causing respiratory and cardiovascular impacts and increased health effects for the most vulnerable;

· The economic costs of rebuilding after areas are struck by wildfires can be beyond the means of low-income countries;

· Watersheds are degraded by wildfires’ pollutants; they also can lead to soil erosion causing more problems for waterways;

· Wastes left behind are often highly contaminated and require appropriate disposal.

Wildfires and climate change are mutually exacerbating. Wildfires are made worse by climate change through increased drought, high air temperatures, low relative humidity, lightning, and strong winds, which causes hotter, drier, and longer fire seasons. At the same time, climate change is made worse by wildfires, mostly by ravaging sensitive and carbon-rich ecosystems like peatlands and rainforests. This turns landscapes into tinderboxes, making it harder to halt rising temperatures.

Wildlife and its natural habitats are rarely spared from wildfires, pushing some animal and plant species closer to extinction. A recent example is the Australian 2020 bushfires, which are estimated to have wiped out billions of domesticated and wild animals.

The report said the restoration of ecosystems is an important avenue to mitigate the risk of wildfires before they occur and to build back better in their aftermath. Wetlands restoration and the reintroduction of species such as beavers, peatlands restoration, building at a distance from vegetation, and preserving open space buffers are some examples of the essential investments into prevention, preparedness and recovery.

Wildfire factors influencing health — Wildfire smoke contains fine particulate matter and potentially toxic combustion products (the latter can be particularly harmful at the wildlandurban interface where waste and rubbish, materials used in buildings and vehicles are often burnt; Hallema et al. 2019). From the report.

The report concludes with a call for stronger international standards for the safety and health of firefighters and for minimizing the risks that they face before, during and after operations. This includes raising awareness of the risks of smoke inhalation, minimising the potential for life-threatening entrapments, and providing firefighters with access to adequate hydration, nutrition, rest, and recovery between shifts. Women firefighters face various challenges ranging from gender discrimination and sexual harassment to ill-designed equipment and protective clothing that puts them at greater risk of injury.

Human Health Exposure wildfire smoke health effects — Smoke particulate exposure pathways and impacts. Smoke exposure is most commonly measured from land-based air pollutant monitors, followed by satellite-based imagery models, with fewer studies measuring personal exposure to smoke (Liu et al. 2015). From the report.

Smoke associated with deforestation fires in the Brazilian Amazon has been found to be responsible for the premature death of almost 3,000 people annually (95 percent percentile confidence interval: 1,065–4,714), demonstrating the regional scale of fire impacts (Reddington et al. 2015).

Our take

The report predicts a global increase of extreme fires of up to 14 percent by 2030 and 30 percent by the end of 2050. The statistics for the United States from the National Interagency Fire Center since the 1980s indicates that the total acres burned and the average size of wildfires has been far exceeding those rates of increase. The data, which does not include Alaska since those fires are managed far differently from the rest of the US, shows during the forty-year period approximately a 400 percent increase in the average size by decade, and more than a 300 percent growth in the total acres burned each year. The statistics for the US are for all fires, not just those that “negatively influence social, economic, or environmental values.”

Another factor that may influence the size of fires in the US is that some wildfires are not totally suppressed and can be herded around to attempt to protect private land, structures, and certain resources. They may burn for months, and occasionally grow far beyond what was expected. The use of a limited suppression strategy can be to allow fire to be reintroduced to replicate natural conditions and reduce fuels. Or in recent years it could be due to extreme fire activity in the Western US and a shortage of firefighting resources as a result of difficulties in hiring, retention and recruitment.

Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Rick and Tom.

Los Angeles FD purchases an electric engine

Bill GabbertFebruary 21, 2022February 21, 2022UncategorizedLos Angeles Fire Department11 Comments

The plug-in hybrid is expected to be delivered in May, 2022

Los Angeles Fire Department's new electric fire engine — Los Angeles Fire Department’s new electric engine is expected to be delivered in May, 2022. LAFD photo.

The Los Angeles Fire Department is expecting to receive one of the very few electric engines that exist in the world. It was ordered from Rosenbauer America in February, 2020 and LAFD Chief Ralph Terrazas said in a tweet today it is scheduled to be delivered in May. It is about a year behind schedule, but that may be because it is a pre-series vehicle based on Rosenbauer’s Concept Fire Truck. It will be the first electric engine in the United States. Three others are in Berlin, Amsterdam, and Dubai. Another Southern California city, Rancho Cucamonga, has also ordered one, with a delivery date in late 2023.

The truck will have will have two batteries with a charge capacity of 100 kilowatt hours. For comparison, a Tesla Model 3 small sedan can be ordered with batteries ranging from 54 to 82 kWh, producing a range of 220 to 353 miles.

The batteries on the truck will enable fully electric operation for roughly two hours and an on-board diesel generator can be activated for extended operations. It will have a 33-gallon diesel tank to serve the generator. If this was a car it would be called a plug-in hybrid.

The LAFD will equip the station that houses the electric engine with rapid-charging technology to ensure the apparatus is always ready to respond to calls.

The engine has a tight turning radius and a relatively short wheel base, which Chief Terrazas said will be an advantage where it will be assigned, Station 82 in Hollywood, an area with narrow roads.

The LAFD released this video shortly after the truck was ordered in February, 2020.

“I am excited that we are the first Department in North America to order this cutting-edge fire engine,” said LAFD Chief Ralph Terrazas in 2020. “The electric fire engine is an innovative tool that will help reduce noise and harmful diesel emissions while providing a flexible tool for firefighting and rescue operations from a technologically advanced platform. We are looking forward to evaluating it in a real-world environment once it hits the streets of Hollywood next year.”

“The future fire truck is fundamentally different from the vehicles which are in service at the fire stations today,” said Dieter Siegel, CEO of Rosenbauer International. “It is multi-functional, fully connected and its flexible interior can be used as a fully featured command center. Its floor can be lowered facilitating minimum boarding and working levels. Electric engines reduce noise and pollution.”

Rosenbauer is the world’s leading manufacturer of firefighting vehicles and equipment. In addition to plants overseas, they have manufacturing facilities in South Dakota, Minnesota, and Nebraska.

Extreme fire weather predicted for areas in New Mexico and Texas

Bill GabbertFebruary 20, 2022February 20, 2022UncategorizedRed Flag Warning

Strong winds and low RH

Warnings February 20 and 21, 2022. NWS. — Red Flag Warnings and Fire Weather Watches, February 20, 2022. NWS.

The National Weather Service has issued a Red Flag Warning in effect Sunday for an area in the East Central Plains in Eastern New Mexico. The forecast calls for 8 to 13 percent relative humidity and 15 to 30 mph winds gusting out of the west at 40 mph.

Similar conditions are predicted for Monday in Southeast New Mexico and Eastern Texas where a Fire Weather Watch is in the forecast for 10 percent relative humidity and southwest winds of 15 to 25 mph gusting to 35. It is likely the Watch will be upgraded to a Red Flag Warning on Monday.

The Hot-Dry-Windy Index for Western Texas shows the fire danger increasing Sunday and Monday, reaching above the 75^th or 90^th percentiles Monday.