Figure 3. Fire spread sequence for Detwiler Fire. Active fire fronts and fire spread vectors are portrayed for the seven-image sequence on 20 July 2017. The background image is a fusion of NAIP colour (depicting vegetation fuels and topography) with a colour density sliced version of the seventh FireMapper 2.0 image.
Now that federal land management agencies are being forced by an act of Congress to begin providing to fire managers the real time location of fires and firefighting resources, it opens a range of cascading benefits beyond just enhancing their safety and situational awareness.
Fire Behavior Analysts that could continuously observe the fire with infrared video from a manned or unmanned aircraft orbiting above the air tankers could make much more accurate, valuable, and timely Fire Behavior Forecasts. The fire spread computer models could be fine-tuned to be more accurate and their outputs could be displayed on the map along with the locations of firefighters who carry tracking devices, enabling the Operations Section Chief to make better-informed strategic and tactical decisions.
But until recently it was not known if georeferenced infrared imagery from an orbiting aircraft was accurate enough to be used for determining the rate of spread.
The short answer is, yes. A paper published last week indicates that the accuracy is sufficient. (FYI — the document is written for other scientists and not for practitioners.)
Figure 7. Wildfire spread during the Rey Fire on 21 August 2016. (a) Time 1 fire front. (b) Time 2 fire front (7 min later). (c) Fire spread vectors and ROS statistics. (d) 3-D perspective image depicting active fire front and spread vectors. (e) Histogram depicting frequency distribution of ROS estimates for all spread vectors in the two-pass imaging sequence.
Unfortunately even though United States taxpayers funded the research through the U.S. government’s National Science Foundation (grant number G00011220), only some of us will be able to read the fruits of the research since it is not an Open Access document. After it is viewed 50 times free access will be shut off.
Open Access logo
It is published at Taylor and Francis Online, a private company based in the United Kingdom. So by the time you read this the company may be charging people to read the document. (UPDATE at 7:42 a.m. MST February 21, 2019: General access to the document has been shut off. The company is now charging $50 to view it for 24 hours.)
Not allowing taxpayers to read government funded research unless they pay for it again is reprehensible.
We all hate paying for something and then not receiving what we paid for. That is what is happening now to taxpayers who pay for government-funded research and then have no access to the findings.
We have ranted about this before, and documented another example a few days ago when we discovered that it will cost us $41 to obtain a copy of the findings from research conducted by the University of Georgia. Associate Professor Luke Naeher and others found that lung function decreases for firefighters who work on prescribed fires for multiple days and are exposed to smoke. Further, it showed that respiratory functions slowly declined over a 10-week season.
This is not the only research that has explored the effects of smoke on wildland firefighters, but it may significantly add to the limited body of knowledge we have on the topic. We won’t know, however, unless we pay a second time in order to see their conclusions.
Researchers at some organizations receive pay raises and promotions based partially on the “publish or perish” meme. A system that requires researchers to publish in journals that are not completely open to the public, is antiquated and has no place in 2011 when a paper can be published in seconds on the internet at little or no cost.
There is no reason for firefighters to go to extreme lengths to help researchers advance the researcher’s career paths unless the firefighters can receive some benefits from the project. So, we are jumping on the idea proposed by Rileymon in a comment on the University of Georgia article:
Maybe it’s time to suggest that firefighter/research subjects boycott new research studies unless the findings are put into the Public Domain?
Here is what we are proposing:
Firefighters, administrators, and land managers should not cooperate with researchers unless they can be assured that findings from the research will be available to the public at no charge immediately following the publication of the findings, or very shortly thereafter.
Researchers should conform to the principles of Open Access.
UPDATE February 22, 2017: There is a sign that the new Trump administration will be even less transparent than his predecessor. A great deal of data is now unavailable on the White House open data portal. It is possible this is just an unannounced temporary change…. we’ll see.
Above: Illustration from Harvard/Yale paper about the impacts of wildfire smoke following climate change. The colors indicate the number of smoke waves based on the primary smoke wave definition (cutoff= 6 μg/m3). The map on the left represents the present day (based on 2004-2009 data). The map on the right represents the future under climate change (based on projected data for the years 2046-2051).
(Originally published at 11:39 a.m. MDT August 16, 2016; edited at 6 p.m. MDT August 17 to include this link to the research paper. We contacted the author and asked for a copy of the document, which we now have on our website for our readers.)
Researchers at Harvard and Yale Universities have written a paper predicting the quantities of wildfire smoke that will be impacting residents of the United States in the years 2046 through 2051. Unfortunately it will cost you $40 to get a copy of the complete results of their research. Open Access to publically funded research is apparently not a priority at Harvard and Yale. (UPDATE: on August 17 we obtained a copy of the paper from one of the authors. But it would still cost $40 to buy it from the journal.)
The information here is obtained from the abstract and one document with supplementary material that was available.
To identify the highest-risk areas, the team used a fire prediction model and advanced atmospheric modeling to separate pollution caused by wildfires from other pollution sources and track the likely movement of smoke. The authors estimate that under future climate change, more than 82 million individuals will experience a 57 percent and 31 percent increase in the frequency and intensity, respectively, of Smoke Waves, which they define as ≥2 consecutive days with high wildfire-specific PM2.5.
Northern California, Western Oregon and the Great Plains are likely to suffer the highest exposure to wildfire smoke in the future. Results point to the potential health impacts of increasing wildfire activity on large numbers of people in a warming climate and the need to establish or modify U.S. wildfire management and evacuation programs in high-risk regions. The study also adds to the growing literature arguing that extreme events in a changing climate could have significant consequences for human health.
A call to Loretta J. Mickley, one of the authors, to ask about access to the publically funded research, was not immediately returned. UPDATE, August 17, 2016: Ms. Mickley did call the following day, and said she was disappointed that Harvard chose a non-Open Access journal in which to place the paper. She said she will send us a copy of the paper and it will also be posted on her web site in the next day or two. We will link to it later. The research was funded, she said, by the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health. In our opinion government agencies that fund research should only do so if the findings are made public at no additional charge.
(UPDATE: we found the paper on Ms. Mickley’s web site and downloaded it.)
The paper’s authors are J.C. Liu, L.J. Mickley, M.P Sulprizio, et al.
The projected percentage increase in the number of “very large fire weeks”—weeks in which conditions are favorable to the occurrence of very large fires—by mid-century (2041-2070) compared to the recent past (1971-2000). (NOAA)
Researchers are predicting that beginning 26 years from now the number of weeks in which very large fires could occur will increase by 400 to 600 percent in portions of the northern great plains and the Northwest. Many other areas in the West will see a 50 to 400 percent increase.
If they are correct, the effects of climate change are not generations away. Firefighters starting out today will be dealing with this on a large scale during their careers.
Warming due to increasing greenhouse gas emissions will likely increase the potential for ‘very large fires’—the top 10 percent of fires, which account for a majority of burned areas in many regions of the United States. Climate change is expected to both intensify fire-friendly weather conditions, as well as lengthen the season during which very large fires tend to spread.
The potential for very large fire events is also expected to increase along the southern coastline and in the forests around the Great Lakes, although the number of events along the northern tier of the country should only increase moderately given the historically low potential for these events.
For this study, researchers considered the average results of 17 climate model simulations to examine how the potential for very large fires is expected to change. Future projections* were based on a higher-emissions scenario called RCP 8.5, which assumes continued increases in carbon dioxide emissions.
Along with the elevated potential for very large fires across the western US in future decades, other climate modeling studies have projected increases in fire danger and temperature, and decreased precipitation and relative humidity during the fire season. The increased potential for these extreme events is also consistent with an observed increase in the number of very large fires in recent decades.
In addition, scientists have detected trends toward overall warming, more frequent heat waves, and diminished soil moisture during the dry season. The combination of these climate conditions and historic fire suppression practices that have led to the build-up of flammable debris have likely led to more frequent large fire events.
At this very moment, more than 56 large wildfires are burning uncontained throughout the West, putting homes, lives, and livelihoods at risk. The smoke created by these fires exacerbates chronic heart and lung diseases while also degrading visibility and altering snowmelt, precipitation patterns, water quality, and soil properties. In addition to public health impacts, projected trends in extreme fire events have important implications for terrestrial carbon emissions and ecosystems.
The authors of the study also note that these findings could place a burden on national and regional resources for fighting fires. Fire suppression costs in the U.S. have more than doubled in recent decades, exceeding $1 billion per year since the year 2000, the National Interagency Fire Center reports. The vast majority of that money is spent on large incidents.
The research was conducted by government employees at taxpayer expense, funded by NOAA, the U.S. Forest Service, and two universities. The authors were: Barbero, R.; Abatzoglou, J.T.; Larkin, N.K.; Kolden, C.A.; and Stocks, B. The title: “Climate change presents increased potential for very large fires in the contiguous United States”. It was published in Australia in the International Journal of Wildland Fire (copies available for $25).
We checked with Frames.gov which posts copies of government-funded research, and were told by Michael Tjoelker, “Unfortunately, due to copyright issues we are not able to distribute full text versions of Journal articles.” However, Renaud Barbero, one of the authors, sent us a copy.
Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to (another) Bill. Typos or errors, report them HERE.
Researchers at the Forest Service’s Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory study how a wildfire spreads, May 21, 2014. Photo by Bill Gabbert.
A new study about the physics of how a wildfire spreads has been completed by government employees, and thankfully it is freely available to taxpayers. A success for Open Access to the products of government-funded research!
The phrase “spreads like wildfire” is well-known but until recent discoveries through experiments conducted by scientists from the Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory, University of Maryland and the University of Kentucky, it wasn’t well-known how wildfires actually spread. Specifically, it was unclear how radiation and convection heat transfer processes, which both occur in wildfires, are organized to produce wildfire spread. Now, evidence presented in a new study, Role of buoyant flame dynamics in wildfire spread, reveals how flame dynamics that produce and transport convective heat effectively governs the spread of wildfire.
Previous studies focused mainly on radiant heat so little was known about the respective roles of convection and radiation on fire spread and most often the assumption was made that radiant heat was the governing factor. But scientists recently found that the net rates of heat transferred by radiation are insufficient because the fine fuel particles that constitute wildland vegetation cool efficiently by convection until contacted by flame.
As stated in the study, “if radiation itself is insufficient to account for fire spread…convection must provide the explanation.” So a team of scientists, led by Mark Finney of the USDA Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station, began looking at flame dynamics.
Utilizing specialized burn chambers and wind tunnels at the Missoula Fire Sciences Lab and the University of Maryland, scientists were able to assimilate and measure flame dynamics. They found this process can correctly scale up to those found in large-scale wildfires. They also conducted outdoor experiments and prescribed fires at Camp Swift, TX. The experiments led to the discovery of previously unrecognized flame behaviors and how those behaviors cause wildfires to spread. They also discovered that flame vorticity (circulations) and instabilities due to the buoyancy of flame gasses, cause wildfires to spread by forcing flames downward into the fuel bed and bursting forward ahead of the fire into fresh fuel (grass, brush, etc.).
“This study opens the door into the little known world of flame dynamics and gets us closer to understanding the complexities of radiative and convective heat and how they affect wildfire spread,” said Finney. The information obtained through this research is significant with the potential to:
Improve firefighter safety by providing better training to recognize and anticipate wildfire behavior
Simplify the physical principles of wildfire spread that can lead to the development of improved prediction models, and,
Improve the ability to mitigate fuel hazards by accurately modeling and describing fuel contribution to wildfires
The team of ten scientists who contributed to this study comes from the USDA Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station’s Missoula Fire Sciences Lab – lead scientist Mark Finney, Ph.D., the University of Maryland’s Department of Fire Protection Engineering – lead scientist Michael Gollner, Ph.D., and the University of Kentucky’s Department of Mechanical Engineering – lead scientist Kozo Saito, Ph.D.
Six brief videos supporting the research are available, but you have to download them onto your device in order to view them.
This important research about a little known weather phenomenon that affects wildfires was conducted by government employees working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Colorado at Boulder. However, to get a copy of this taxpayer-funded research, you will have to pay $38 to a private organization, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., a corporation that for the year that ended April 30, 2015 had $1.8 billion in revenue and a net income of $176 million. In that year, 64 percent of their revenue came from journal subscriptions.
While some government and university employees may be able to access this and other research papers, they can only do it because their employer pays tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in subscription fees to these private companies. The employees can seamlessly read the papers, and don’t always realize that non-employees can’t.
Gowers Weblog has an exhaustive article about this issue in which he lists the exorbitant subscription fees paid by some universities in the United States.
He noted, for example, that the state universities in Arizona pay a total of $2.7 million to just one of these private outfits, Elsevier.
The authors of the paper are Andrew O. Langford (U. of Colo.), R. B. Pierce (NOAA), and P. J. Schultz (NOAA).
The University of Colorado and NOAA have graciously allowed this brief summary of the publicly-funded research to be released — to the public:
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Southern Californians and writers love to blame the hot, dry Santa Ana winds for tense, ugly moods, and the winds have long been associated with destructive wildfires. Now, NOAA researchers have found that on occasion, the winds have an accomplice with respect to fires, at least: Natural atmospheric events known as stratospheric intrusions, which bring extremely dry air from the upper atmosphere down to the surface, adding to the fire danger effects of the Santa Anas, and exacerbating some air pollution episodes.
Satellite image of the smoke on 2 May 2013, the first day of the Springs Fire northwest of Los Angeles. The photo was taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite.
The findings suggest that forecast models with the capacity to predict stratospheric intrusions may provide valuable lead time for agencies to issue air quality alerts and fire weather warnings, or to reallocate fire fighting resources before these extreme events occur.
“The atmosphere could give us an early warning for some wildfires,” said Andrew Langford, a research chemist at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, and lead author of the study. Researchers at NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder coauthored the work, which was accepted for publication this week in the American Geophysical Union journal Geophysical Research Letters.
The authors took a detailed look at the May 2013 “Springs Fire” that burned 25,000 acres about 50 miles northwest of Los Angeles. The researchers used a NOAA forecast model that incorporates satellite observations of ozone, wind data, and other atmospheric information to detect the occurrence of the intrusions.
The analysis showed that in the early hours before the Springs Fire, a tongue of air characteristic of the stratosphere—extremely dry and very high in ozone from the stratosphere’s ozone layer—reached to the surface in southern California and extended as far south as Baja California.
The researchers found that ground-based monitoring stations near the fire’s origin also confirmed the telltale signs of the intrusion right before the fire broke out: A large drop in relative humidity and a rise in ozone. As the day went on, a combination of factors accelerated the fire: Low humidity, persistent high winds, dry condition of the grasses and other vegetation, clear skies and bright sunlight, and very warm surface temperatures. A few days later, cloudy skies, a drop in temperature, a shift in winds, and widespread rainfall helped extinguish the fire.
The stratospheric intrusion also had another downside during the Springs Fire: it added ozone from the upper atmosphere to the urban and fire-related pollution produced in the lower atmosphere. On the second and third days of the fire, this helped to push levels of ozone—which can harm people’s lungs and damage crops—over the federal ozone limit at 24 monitoring sites across southern California. Monitors as far away as Las Vegas also saw a spike in ozone on the third day of the fire. The observed exceedances of the ozone standard were unusual for the region for that time period, suggesting that the stratospheric intrusions were a contributing factor.
“Stratospheric intrusions are double trouble for Southern California,” said Langford. “We knew that the intrusions can add to surface ozone pollution. Now we know that they also can contribute to the fire danger, particularly during La Niña years when deep intrusions are more frequent, as recently shown by our NOAA colleagues at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. The good news is that with models and observations, we can get an early warning from the atmosphere in some cases.”
The authors note that stratospheric intrusions have previously been implicated in the explosive development of wildland fires in New Jersey and Michigan, but have not previously been connected to fires in southern California or to the Santa Ana winds. The frequent occurrence of stratospheric intrusions above the west coast during the fall, winter, and spring suggests that similar circumstances may have played a role in other major southern California fires, including the series of destructive fires that burned more than 800,000 acres in October of 2003, and burned nearly a million acres in October of 2007, say the authors.
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(UPDATE July 12, 2015: We contacted one of the authors, Andrew Langford, and he sent us a copy of the paper, which has not been copyedited and typeset yet.)
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.
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.
A smoldering peatland fire in shown in a drained lakebed in Florida, where the fire smoldered for months and consumed several feet of organic soil in some places. Credit: Desert Research Institute, the environmental research arm of the Nevada System of Higher Education.
“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.
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.
