Wildfire briefing, July 31, 2013

Two reports released about air tankers

The U.S. Forest Service recently released two reports about firefighting aircraft, the products of contracts issued by the agency. The details are over at Fire Aviation, but here is a summary:

  1.  AVID, a Virginia-based company that employed a crew of retired and current aviation professionals, produced a report “…to build analytical data that can be used to estimate the requirement for airtankers in the future.” The Fire Aviation article about the report can be found here.
  2. The U.S. Forest Service has released a study on how the C-27J could be used by the agency if the Air Force gives them seven of the aircraft as expected.

Summary of fire stats

The National Park Service’s Morning Report written by Bill Halainen has a table that tracks some of the statistics about fires over the last five days. Here is an example from today’s report:

Fire summary, July 31, 2013

Judge rejects California’s lawsuit over 2007 fire

A judge has thrown out a lawsuit brought by the state of California against the state’s largest timber company over liability for the 2007 Moonlight Fire which burned more than 65,000 acres in Northern California. The state was hoping to recoup some of the $22.5 million spent fighting the fire.

Last year the company, Sierra Pacific, agreed to pay nearly $50 million and donate 22,500 acres of land to settle a federal government lawsuit over the Moonlight fire.

Congressional Task Force Links Worsening Wildfires to Climate Change

On Tuesday the Bicameral Task Force on Climate Change convened a panel of experts on climate and wildland fire to discuss the impacts of climate change on wildfires. Below is an excerpt from an article at the National Journal:

…Panelists cited a number of reasons for wildfire flare-ups, including land-use patterns and insect activity. But the discussion kept circling back to climate change.

“Scientists tell us these changes are not just random variability,” Waxman said. “Bigger and more-intense fires are one of the red flags of climate change.”

Climate-change expert William Sommers, a researcher at George Mason University’s EastFIRE Laboratory, agreed. Sommers cautioned that rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide will only worsen wildfires in decades to come. “If current greenhouse-gas emission trends are not sharply reversed in the immediate future, we will see observed trends in wildfire risk accelerate,” he warned.

Waxman and Whitehouse asked firefighting and forestry experts for policy recommendations to help mitigate the situation.

Panelists, including Santa Fe, N.M., Fire Chief Erik Litzenberg and Rick Swan, director of supervisory personnel and health and safety for the California Department of Forestry Firefighters, cited budget cuts as a major stumbling block in efforts to combat wildfires, and called for increased funding for park services and firefighters.

“We are seeing a dramatic increase in the number of fires, especially in California,” Swan said. “But we are not seeing the same increase in staffing levels and funding.”

Wildfire briefing July 19, 2013

Seven things to know about fire aviation

Check out the new article over at Fire Aviation about MAFFS, broken CV-580 nose gear, an update on next-gen air tankers, Neptune’s grid test, U.S. Forest Service C-27s, a shortage of lead planes, and an update on the 20,000-gallon 747 Supertanker

Senator Harry Reid talks about fighting fire “on the cheap”

It’s probably not likely that the Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate reads Wildfire Today, but if he had he would have found that we have something in common, an aversion of trying to fight fire “on the cheap”. We have used that phrase many times, and Senator Harry Reid uttered the words Wednesday, according to an article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal in which he was discussing the Carpenter 1 fire just west of Las Vegas:

WASHINGTON — As firefighters head home from Southern Nevada, U.S. Sen. Harry Reid on Wednesday blamed “climate change” for the intense blaze that consumed nearly 28,000 acres and drove hundreds of residents from their homes around Mount Charleston this month.

Reid said the government should be spending “a lot more” on fire prevention, echoing elected officials who say the Forest Service should move more aggressively to remove brush and undergrowth that turn small fires into huge ones.

“The West is burning,” the Nevada Democrat told reporters in a meeting. “I could be wrong, but I don’t think we’ve ever had a fire in the Spring Mountains, Charleston range like we just had.

“Why are we having them? Because we have climate change. Things are different. The forests are drier, the winters are shorter, and we have these terrible fires all over the West.”

“This is terribly concerning,” Reid said. Dealing with fire “is something we can’t do on the cheap.”

“We have climate change. It’s here. You can’t deny it,” Reid went on. “Why do you think we are having all these fires?”

The thrill of covering a wildfire

Jay Calderon, a photographer for MyDesert.com, wrote an article in which he wrote, “Covering a wildfire is one of the more exhilarating things I get to do as a photojournalist.”

A premature and shallow examination of the Yarnell Hill Fire

I have mixed feelings about mentioning a report that has just been released about the Yarnell Hill Fire that killed 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots. But, it is already being referenced in articles, so you may hear about it regardless.

An official investigation is going on now. After it is released we will have much more information about what did, or did not happen that resulted in the tragedy. In spite of the lack of details available, an organization called Pacific Biodiversity Institute wrote a 34-page document expressing the opinions of the authors, Peter H. Morrison and George Wooten. Mr. Morrison’s expertise, according to their web site, is in “conservation biology and ecology with additional expertise in GIS, botany, conservation planning and management”, while Mr. Wooten is described as a “botanist and website developer”.

Their report is shallow, relies on cliches, summarizes the fire behavior describing it multiple times by saying the fire “exploded”, does not understand the nuances of fighting fire or fire behavior, and reaches very detailed and specific conclusions about the vulnerability of hundreds of individual structures based solely on satellite imagery.

So even though they quoted our analysis of the facts about the weather that was recorded by a nearby weather station, and how that could have affected the fire behavior, we can’t recommend their report as authoritative.

Families of Granite Mountain 19 to receive large sums of money

The families of the firefighters that were killed on the Yarnell Hill fire could each receive payments of close to half a million dollars, according to an analysis by NBC News. They came to that conclusion after considering the donations that have been received, the U.S. Justice Department’s Public Safety Officers’ Benefits Programs for law enforcement and fire officers injured or killed in the line of duty, plus Workmen’s Compensation benefits. Hopefully this will do a lot toward taking care of the wives and surviving children.

Unusually high wildfire danger in Scotland

Due to very hot weather (for them) Scotland and other parts of the UK are experiencing many more wildfires than usual. Scotsman.com explains:

Devastating wildfires have ripped through parts of Scotland as the longest heatwave for seven years spread across Britain and forecasters warned temperatures could climb as high as 35C [95F].

Mountain blazes tore across the south Wales’ valleys while flames devastated swathes of Tentsmuir Forest in north east Fife, Scotland, last night, and London experienced its worst grass fires since 2006.

The spate of hot weather is believed to have caused up to 760 premature deaths already and weathermen today warned that the hottest day of the year is yet to come.

John Mayer’s Wildfire

I sometimes check out the hashtag #wildfire on twitter, but for the last few days it has been flooded with something about John Mayer and “Wildfire”. So finally I checked it out, and it’s the name of a new song which has the line “…You and me are catching on like a wildfire”. The video is below.

You may remember that a John Mayer concert in Livingston, Montana earlier this year raised more than $100,000 to help firefighters who battled the 2012 Pine Creek Fire that burned through the community of Pine Creek seven miles south of Livingston August 29, 2012.  He owns a home there but was not in the area when five homes and 8,500 acres burned.

So in my book, he gets a break when he sings about “Wildfire”.

Research: wildland fire smoke, including tar balls, contribute to climate change more than previously thought

Manvendra Dubey
Manvendra Dubey

As soon as they were able to repopulate the facility after being evacuated due to the huge Las Conchas Fire in 2011, scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico set up an extensive aerosol sampling system to monitor the smoke from the smoldering fire for more than 10 days.  The team used field-emission scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive X ray spectroscopy to analyze the aerosol samples and determined that spherical carbonaceous particles they called “tar balls” were 10 times more abundant than soot. The Los Alamos scientists were the first to discover tar balls and coated soot.

Senior laboratory scientist Manvedra Dubey noted that, “Most climate assessment models treat fire emissions as a mixture of pure soot and organic carbon aerosols that offset the respective warming and cooling effects of one another on climate. However Las Conchas results show that tar balls exceed soot by a factor of 10 and the soot gets coated by organics in fire emissions, each resulting in more of a warming effect than is currently assumed.” He said this should have a huge impact on how the aerosols are treated in computer models.

These photos of soot particles from the Las Conchas Fire are from a paper written by Mr. Debey and the three other scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory listed below.

Bare soot particle
Bare soot particle. Los Alamos National Laboratory image.
Embedded soot particle
Embedded soot particle. Los Alamos National Laboratory image.

Mr. Dubey, along with postdoctoral fellow Allison Aiken and post-bachelor’s student Kyle Gorkowski, coordinated with Michigan Tech professor Claudio Mazzoleni (a former Los Alamos Director’s fellow) and graduate student Swarup China to perform the study.

This week on Twitter Mr. Dubey solicited and then answered questions about his fire smoke research:

Lab Chat Q&A Summary

Continue reading “Research: wildland fire smoke, including tar balls, contribute to climate change more than previously thought”

The President talks about climate change and wildfires

On Tuesday President Obama made a major speech at Georgetown University about climate change. Within a few paragraphs, he used the word “fire”, “wildfire”, or “firefighters” five times.

Below is an excerpt from that section of the speech. The entire transcript is HERE.

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“…The 12 warmest years in recorded history have all come in the last 15 years. Last year, temperatures in some areas of the ocean reached record highs, and ice in the Arctic shrank to its smallest size on record — faster than most models had predicted it would. These are facts.

Now, we know that no single weather event is caused solely by climate change. Droughts and fires and floods, they go back to ancient times. But we also know that in a world that’s warmer than it used to be, all weather events are affected by a warming planet. The fact that sea level in New York, in New York Harbor, are now a foot higher than a century ago — that didn’t cause Hurricane Sandy, but it certainly contributed to the destruction that left large parts of our mightiest city dark and underwater.

The potential impacts go beyond rising sea levels. Here at home, 2012 was the warmest year in our history. Midwest farms were parched by the worst drought since the Dust Bowl, and then drenched by the wettest spring on record. Western wildfires scorched an area larger than the state of Maryland. Just last week, a heat wave in Alaska shot temperatures into the 90s.

And we know that the costs of these events can be measured in lost lives and lost livelihoods, lost homes, lost businesses, hundreds of billions of dollars in emergency services and disaster relief. In fact, those who are already feeling the effects of climate change don’t have time to deny it — they’re busy dealing with it. Firefighters are braving longer wildfire seasons, and states and federal governments have to figure out how to budget for that. I had to sit on a meeting with the Department of Interior and Agriculture and some of the rest of my team just to figure out how we’re going to pay for more and more expensive fire seasons.”

Global greening: another long term effect on wildfires

The predictions that climate change will result in higher temperatures leading to more wildfires has received a lot of attention in the last few years. But one effect that is under the radar is the effect that higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will have on wildfires. Your first thought might be that oxygen is an important leg of the heat/fuel/oxygen fire triangle. Higher levels of CO2 might mean lower levels of oxygen which could affect the rate of spread of a fire.

The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has received some notice recently as the level has approached 400 parts per million, up nearly 22 points from a decade ago, according to NOAA. Here is an excerpt from an article in the LA Times:

Current ratios of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere remain at levels not seen in more than 3 million years, when sea levels were as much as 80 feet higher than current levels.

The article I just read at science.nbcnews.com did not mention if oxygen levels will be lower or what that effect may be. But it does say that higher CO2  levels will promote plant growth even in arid areas, which could mean more fuel available for fires and a higher resistance to control.

Analyzing only three decades of data makes it is difficult to attribute increased foliage to higher CO2 levels, but the 11 percent change that the researchers found is pretty interesting.

Below are some excerpts from the article about research by Randall Donohue, an environmental scientist at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization:

Increases in CO2 also fertilize plant growth by making more carbon available to plants and allowing plants to lose less water to the air during the process of photosynthesis. Plants need carbon and water for growth. More of both, means more growth, Donohue explained.

To detect the effect in nature, he and colleagues focused on satellite imagery of warm and dry environments around the world where rainfall — the biggest factor in plant growth — is limited. This makes it easier to see vegetation growth in satellite imagery and account for the effect of rainfall.

The greening effect of increased CO2 is a global phenomenon. It is even seen in areas that are getting drier due to reduced rainfall and warmer temperatures as a result of global climate change, the researchers noted.

“If a brown place is getting drier, we can expect that the ‘browning’ won’t be as severe as it would have been if CO2 levels were unchanged,” Donohue explained. “Similarly, we can expect that the greening that would occur when a dry place gets wetter will be greater now because of higher CO2 levels.”

The implications of the findings are potentially significant, he added. For example, it could change how much carbon is soaked up by plants and the amount of woody fuel available for forest fires.

“It needs to be considered as an important piece of the overall global-change puzzle that we are still trying to figure out.”