According to researchers who published a recent paper in the International Journal of Wildland Fire (Volume 18[7] 2009), climate change will increase the number and burn severity of fires in Yosemite National Park. Using fire records, weather data, and satellite imagery they analyzed the fires in the park that occurred between 1984 and 2005. Comparing snowfall records with fire severity, they determined that during those years, decreased spring snowpack exponentially increased the number of lightning-ignited fires and the proportion of the landscape that burned at higher severities.
The researchers then made some predictions:
Using one snowpack forecast, we project that the number of lightning-ignited fires will increase 19.1% by 2020 to 2049 and the annual area burned at high severity will increase 21.9%. Climate-induced decreases in snowpack and the concomitant increase in fire severity suggest that existing assumptions may be understated – fires may become more frequent and more severe.
Here is the way this is supposed to work. There is some evidence to suggest that increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will lead to more lightning strikes. With less snow, the lightning strikes are more likely to ignite fires. The dryer fuels will result in the fires burning more intensely.
UPDATE, November 5, 2009:
The authors of the report are James A. Lutz, Jan W. van Wagtendonk, Andrea E. Thode, Jay D. Miller, and Jerry F. Franklin. They are employed by the National Park Service, the U. S. Forest Service, the University of Washington, and Northern Arizona University.
They chose to publish the results of their taxpayer-funded research in a publication that is not accessible to taxpayers unless they pay substantial subscription or membership fees to the International Journal of Wildland Fire or the International Association of Wildland fire. IAWF members after paying their membership fee can access the content of the Journal.
We have written about this issue before. If you want a copy of this taxpayer-funded research, you can pay the fees, or you can email James A. Lutz at jlutz@u.washington.edu and ask him for a copy.
The authors of the report are James A. Lutz, Jan W. van Wagtendonk, Andrea E. Thode, Jay D. Miller, and Jerry F. Franklin. They are employed by the National Park Service, the U. S. Forest Service, the University of Washington, and Northern Arizona University.
They chose to publish the results of their taxpayer-funded research in a publication that is not accessible to taxpayers unless they pay substantial subscription or membership fees to the International Journal of Wildland Fire or the International Association of Wildland fire. IAWF members after paying their membership fee can access the content of the Journal.
We have written about this issue before. If you want a copy of this taxpayer-funded research, you can pay the fees, or you can email James A. Lutz at jlutz@u.washington.edu and ask him for a copy.
Ben Clegg and study co-authors Linda Brubaker and Feng Sheng Hu collect sediment cores from a lake in the Brooks Range, AK. (Credit: Philip Higuera)
It seems to be the conventional wisdom that climate change, in this case warmer temperatures, will lead to (or has led to) more fires and more acres burned. And that may be the case in the short term, but a new study shows that over the last 15,000 years warmer temperatures resulted in changes to vegetation types with more resistance to wildfires–at least in Alaska.
The research was led by Philip Higuera of Montana State University who examined historical fire frequency in northern Alaska by analyzing sediments at the bottom of lakes. The cores they took showed changes in plant parts, pollen, and accumulations of charcoal deposits. From this they could determine vegetation type and fire frequency which they then compared to known historical climate changes.
They found that climate change involving warmer temperatures caused the vegetation to change from flammable shrubs to more fire-resistant deciduous trees.
Higuera concludes:
Climate affects vegetation, vegetation affects fire, and both fire and vegetation respond to climate change. Most importantly, our work emphasizes the need to consider the multiple drivers of fire regimes when anticipating their response to climate change.
From Ecological Society of America (2009, April 21). Plants Could Override Climate Change Effects On Wildfires. ScienceDaily. Retrieved April 21, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090421111701.htm
Senator Tom Carper (D-Del.) has been named to one of the co-chair positions on the Congressional Fire Services Caucus, filling the position vacated by Vice President Joe Biden. During a speech at the Delaware Fire school, Carper said:
I am proud to have the opportunity to continue Delaware’s long tradition of leadership on fire issues in Washington. I have always enjoyed working with and for the men and women in Delaware who serve their neighbors and their communities as firefighters. I look forward to deepen that relationship in the coming years as a co-chair of the Congressional Fire Services Caucus.
Others serving as co-chairs are Sens. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), Susan Collins (R-Maine) John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Congressmen Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), Jo Ann Emerson (R-Mo.), Rob Andrews (D-N.J.) and Peter King (R-N.Y.).
Fighting fire on slopes of volcano in Guatemala
Untrained firefighters suppressing a fire on the slopes of Volcano Santo Tomas in Guatemala.
From The Guatemala Times:
Guatemala, Sololá- Urgent help is needed to fight the wildfire that began a month ago on the slopes of Volcano Santo Tomas in Xejuyup, Nahualá, Sololá, 3.5 hours drive from Guatemala City, still has not been brought under control. 35,550 residents in 19 communities have been going through more than two weeks of emergency with no drinking water available.
The fire on the slope of the volcano began February 10 and is approximately 6 to 10 hours away from the surrounding communities. Local authorities have been alarmed but little has been done to help. The communities have been organizing themselves, 1,500 untrained firefighters, into groups to make rounds to control the fire.
To date the fire has destroyed an estimated 2,965 acres of forest and habitats of species and individuals on this coffee-growing highland. The National System for Prevention and Control of Forest (Sipecif) sent out 75 people to monitor the situation but so far has been unable to control the fire. Appeals have been made to the Governor of Sololá, authorities in Santa Catarina Nahualá and Ixtahuacán, and the central government.
“The Guatemalan government coordinated with the Mexican government to send two helicopters to conduct an evaluation, but nothing has been done to control the fire,” says Axtup. “Our community firefighters walk six hours on foot to the place of the fire incidents. Without the right tools and expertise, it’s almost impossible to do it all by ourselves.”
Juniper fire on Ocala National Forest grows to 3,500 acres
Brush engines on Forest Road 65 working on the Juniper fire near Juniper Springs. Photo: Doug Engle, Ocala.com
The Juniper fire, near Juniper Sprins on the Ocala National Forest in Florida, started on March 10 and has now burned 3,500 acres and is 15% contained. The fire started from an escaped campfire and tripled in size during the last 24 hours. Three people were issued mandatory appearance citations for allowing their campfire to escape. The area has not received any rain for at least 22 days.
Shortly after the fire started, the Blue Type 1 Incident Management Team from the southeast geographical area was ordered, but that order was cancelled on March 11.
Fire season predictions
New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson says it will be a tough fire season because much of his state has received little to no precipitation since the first of the year. The dry conditions have contributed to 38,610 acres burned since January 1. State fire leaders told the Governor Thursday during a briefing that the weather conditions and predictions are dire.
Esperanza fire penalty hearing
The penalty hearing, which is expected to last 2 weeks, continued on Thursday with Chief Bradley Harris from CalFire reconstructing the movements of some of the victims, the crew of USFS Engine 57 that died in the fire set intentionally by Raymond Oyler, convicted of murder and setting the fire.
Harris said, for instance, that Daniel Hoover-Najera ran for “well over 30 seconds” before he succumbed to the flames.
Several relatives of the deceased firefighters testified about their loved ones and the impacts on their personal lives since their loss.
From the Press-Enterprise:
On Thursday, Riverside County Superior Court Judge W. Charles Morgan ordered jail personnel to make sure Oyler was getting his prescribed medication. Defense attorney Mark McDonald said his client had not been receiving the medicine recently because Oyler arrived back at the jail from the courthouse after the dispensary had been issued.
A court-appointed psychologist this week said Oyler was competent to stand for the penalty phase of his trial.
During the week, Oyler displayed twitching movements at the counsel table. He also muttered to himself, sometimes asked his attorneys whispered questions, and at other times appeared heavy-lidded and on the verge of sleep.
McDonald said his client received his medication on Wednesday night and seemed to be faring better on Thursday. Oyler takes anti-depressant and anti-tremor medications, among others.
The hearing will resume on Monday.
Global Temperature
The global average temperature in 2008 was the coolest in 10 years, but it was still the ninth warmest year since continuous instrumental records were started in 1880. Those who deny that global warming exists don’t realize the debate ended 10 years ago.
Petition signers opposed prescribed burning because of “beautification of our natural lands”
A District Ranger and a Fire Management Officer from the Cherokee National Forest in eastern Tennessee held a public meeting about their planned prescribed burns, but only two members of the public showed up.
However, Danny Price, a field representative for U.S. Rep. Phil Rowe was there and presented a petition signed by 123 citizens opposed to prescribed fire, which said:
“We, the undersigned, are opposed to the prescribed and control burning of U.S. Forest Service property … Due to strong south winds, the burning would affect elderly people, as well as close proximity to dwelling houses, churches, the home for children, the Oaks Family Conference Center and Campground, schools, small game, trees that young animals are born in, not to mention the beautification of our natural lands.”
In spite of the low attendance, the DR and the FMO put on a full-blown presentation about the merits of prescribed burning.
The Sacramento Bee has an interesting article about how climate change is affecting wildland fires. Here is an excerpt.
Wildfire has marched across the West for centuries. But no longer are major conflagrations fueled simply by heavy brush and timber. Now climate change is stoking the flames higher and hotter, too.
That view, common among firefighters, is reflected in new studies that tie changing patterns of heat and moisture in the western United States to an unprecedented rash of costly and destructive wildfires.
Among other things, researchers have found the frequency of wildfire increased fourfold – and the terrain burned expanded sixfold – as summers grew longer and hotter over the past two decades.
The fire season now stretches out 78 days longer than it did during the 1970s and ’80s. And, on average, large fires burn for more than a month, compared with just a week a generation ago.
Scientists also have discovered that in many places, nothing signals a bad fire year like a short winter and an early snowmelt. Overall, 72 percent of the land scorched across the West from 1987 to 2003 burned in early snowmelt years.
Across the Sierra, satellite imagery shows that today’s wildfires are far more destructive than fires of the past, leaving larger portions of the burned landscape looking like nuclear blast zones. That searing intensity, in turn, is threatening water quality, wildlife habitat, rural and resort communities and firefighter lives.
As the climate warms, the ability of the region’s mixed conifer forest ecosystem to recover from these destructive fires is in danger.
“We’re getting into a place where we are almost having a perfect storm” for wildfire, said Jay Miller, a U.S. Forest Service researcher and lead author of a recent paper published in the scientific journal Ecosystems linking climate change to the more severe fires in the Sierra.
“We have increased fuels, but this changing climate is adding an additional stress on the whole situation,” Miller said. “When things get bad, things will get much worse.”
Longer, more intense fire seasons
That future may already have arrived. This year, the fire season got off to an early June start in the north state and only recently came to a close. Statewide, 1.4 million acres burned in 2008, just shy of last year’s 1.5 million acres, the highest total in at least four decades.
“When I started fighting fire, the normal fire season was from the beginning of June to the end of September,” said Pete Duncan, a fuels management officer for the Plumas National Forest. “Now we are bringing crews on in the middle of April and they are working into November and December.”
“And we’re seeing fires now burning in areas that normally we wouldn’t consider a high-intensity burn situation.”
Just a few weeks ago, Duncan heard about one such incident: the Panther fire on the Klamath National Forest near the Oregon border.
“It made an eight-mile run one afternoon, in late October. It burned through an area of fairly high elevation old-growth timber and at very high severity,” Duncan said.
“I was kind of amazed,” he added, “that something would have burned to that scale. To make a 40,000-acre run in an afternoon is significant for any time of year – but particularly for that time of year.”
JACKSON, WYOMING – Now might be a good time to get into the firefighting business.
If science and history are a guide, the world and particularly the Rocky Mountain West are poised on the cusp of a dangerous increase in the size and frequency of large fires, caused by a warming climate.
“By the end of this century we’re expecting the area in Canada that burns to double,” said Mike Flannigan, a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service. “Others say it will be a change of three to five times. It looks pretty gloomy.”
An increasing risk of large fires may not be news to landowners and homeowners who have been scorched by recent blazes. But speakers at a conference here Wednesday put a finer point on the idea, backing it up with reams of charts and boat loads of scientific research outlined in PowerPoint presentations.
El Cariso Hot Shots catch their breath after being chased out of a fire on the San Bernardino National Forest, 1972. Photo by Bill Gabbert.
Flannigan is one of many researchers who spoke Wednesday at a weeklong conference titled “The ’88 Fires, Yellowstone and Beyond,” co-sponsored by the National Park Service and the International Association of Wildland Fire. Many of Wednesday’s talks focused on climate change and its effects on wildfires.
[…]
Based on data already compiled, the West is on the front of a rising curve for more large fires. Research by Anthony Westerling, of the University of California-Merced, showed that fires more than 500 acres in size have increased by 300 percent since 1985 on National Park Service, Forest Service and Bureau of Indian Affairs lands.
Westerling examined how rising temperatures have affected earlier spring runoffs and in many cases led to warmer, drier summers. His studies showed that between 1970 and 2008, there has been a 78-day increase in the fire season. The average burn time for fires has risen from one week to five weeks.
Projecting his data into the future, Westerling sees the average fire year between 2072 and 2099 looking similar in moisture deficit to Yellowstone National Park in 1988, when 794,000 acres burned.
“This is assuming we keep producing as much CO2,” he said. “I can’t get a sense of how you would manage yourself out of this change.”
Fire managers note that they’re already seeing unusual fire behavior.
Steve Frye, of the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, said, “We are experiencing extreme, aggressive fire behavior in places where we haven’t in the past,” including fires at elevations and in fuel types where fires didn’t used to burn.
Fighting such fires has become more complicated, he said, thanks in large part to the construction of houses near forests, which he called “the single largest challenge and change for fire managers in the last 20 years.”
Meanwhile, firefighting agencies have had to deal with a decline in the number of firefighters and equipment used to battle blazes. Agencies would need twice the resources they now have to keep fires at current levels, something that’s not going to happen. So fire managers have had to adapt.
“We are making better decisions in how we assign our resources,” Frye said. “But we’re also assigning units to protection that could be used elsewhere.”
Flannigan, the Canadian researcher, said the situation north of the border could well apply to the Western United States.
“It’s almost a given that we’ll see more fire activity, more ignitions,” he said. “This is a global problem, and it’s going to require global solutions.”
Montana county initiates new emergency information website
On September 10 we wrote on Wildfire Today, in part:
Making real time information about the fire’s location available, interpreting that data to decide what areas should evacuate and which areas are safe, then providing this data to the public in near-real-time is not a small task. But it could be argued that this should be the most important objective of fire managers, above and beyond the boiler-plate written into every Incident Action Plan of “provide for the safety of the public and firefighters”.
In that post we further explained how this could be done, using the Internet and various sources of information.
We don’t know if the Madison County Commissioners were aware of that post, but they recently….
….gave speedy and unanimous approval to develop a county sponsored “emergency information” web-site. The site (madison.homestead.com) was up and running the next day.
The new web-site will be maintained by the County Communications Department. The site is intended to allow county residents extremely fast (nearly instant) access to information related to significant county emergencies and urgent county related information.
The County Commissioners all agreed that since Madison County has no local television or radio stations, there is no reliable way to allow residents immediate access to developing or changing information. Particularly, information related to significant, long duration county emergencies – as evidenced during the Labor Day Hebgen Dam incident.
Even though early in the incident, designated Public Information Officers tried desperately to alert the media in Bozeman about the situation at Hebgen, the television coverage of the incident was weak at best.
During the Hebgen event, local residents were generally aware that there was an emergency of some sort, but had difficulty accessing timely and rapidly changing facts of the incident. Consequently, due to an information vacuum, the rumor mill took over – and many residents understandably reacted to inaccurate information.
From The Latest.
And they had the web site “up and running the next day”! Congratulations to the forward-thinking County Commissioners of Madison County, Montana!
The biggest overall influence on global wildfire activity in the last 2,000 years has been climate, according to a new study that also shows humans have played a significant role in fire levels in recent centuries.
Researchers looked at charcoal levels in hundreds of corings of ancient lake sediments and peat from around the world.
What they found is that until about 1750, there was a long-term decline in burning, reflecting a global cooling trend. Then, as global settlement expanded and the Industrial Revolution took hold, wildfires increased, peaking around 1870. Farmers used fire to clear the land. Increased fossil-fuel use contributed to rising levels of carbon dioxide that sped plant growth and created more to burn. More people meant more fires started by humans.
But starting in the late 19th century, settlement had the opposite effect, particularly in western North America, the tropics and Asia.
Livestock ate the native grasses that had helped fuel frequent, low-intensity fires in the West. Wildlands were replaced by farms. During the 20th century, fire suppression became the norm in many parts of the world.
The result was an abrupt drop in fires, despite a warming climate.
The paper, “Climate and Human Influences on Global Biomass Burning over the Past Two Millennia,” was published online Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience and was written by a nine-member team from the U.S., Europe and Great Britain.
It did not take into account recent decades, when wildfires in the U.S. have been on the rise.
Patrick Bartlein, a University of Oregon geography professor and one of the study authors, said climate is regaining the upper hand as the dominant force.
“All signs point to the idea that with continued global climate change … we’ll see more and bigger” fires.
