Wildfire briefing, October 26, 2015

Oregon declares wildfire season to be over

Bald Butte area fire
A fire in the Bald Butte area started near Springfield, Oregon October 10 when a burning car ignited vegetation above Forest Service Road 23. Dry fuels and gusty winds left 24 acres of burnt timber and brush on national forest lands. Oregon Department of Forestry photo by Greg Wagenblast.

The Oregon Department of Forestry has declared the 2015 wildfire season to be over. Rain and the arrival of cool, moist weather patterns prompted the declaration as of 12:01 a.m. Saturday. Oregon experienced a third consecutive difficult wildfire season this year. As of Sept. 11, total wildfire costs totaled more than $211 million in Oregon, according to the Oregon Department of Forestry. (That figure may include costs incurred by all agencies in the state, including federal, not just the ODF.)

The Oregon state government has an insurance policy with Lloyd’s of London which provides up to $25 million of state government fire suppression costs that exceed $50 million. The $3.5 million cost of the policy is split between the state and private timberland owners.

Board approves design for Yarnell Hill Fire memorial

The Yarnell Hill Memorial Site Board has approved a conceptual design for a memorial to commemorate the site where 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots were entrapped by fire and killed June 30, 2013. According to the Daily Courier, the design by architect Bill Gauslow “consists of 19 white marble crosses, each placed where a man fell, surrounded by 19 low walls, spaced a short distance apart, and built of rip-rap rock.” The memorial would be placed at the fatality site which will be purchased by the Arizona State Parks department. Interpretive signs, one for each of the 19 firefighters, would also be placed every 1/10 mile along the 1.9 mile trail from the parking lot to the memorial site.

Researchers think fires were more common 300 million years ago

Scientists from the Department of Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London together with colleagues from the USA, Russia and China, have discovered that forest fires across the globe were more common between 300 and 250 million years ago than they are today. This is thought to be due to a higher level of oxygen in the atmosphere at that time.

Full text of the research article.

Landfill near nuclear waste site has been burning for six years

From the Chicago Tribune:

Beneath the surface of a St. Louis-area landfill lurk two things that should never meet: a slow-burning fire and a cache of Cold War-era nuclear waste, separated by no more than 1,200 feet.

Government officials have quietly adopted an emergency plan in case the smoldering embers ever reach the waste, a potentially “catastrophic event” that could send up a plume of radioactive smoke over a densely populated area near the city’s main airport.

Although the fire at Bridgeton Landfill has been burning since at least 2010, the plan for a worst-case scenario was developed only a year ago and never publicized until this week, when St. Louis radio station KMOX first obtained a copy…

Scientist discovers method for reducing cheatgrass

Ann Kennedy
Ann Kennedy, a soil scientist with the Agricultural Research Service. ARS photo.
A soil scientist working for the Agriculture Research Service has discovered a naturally occurring bacteria that could kill cheatgrass, or at least reduce the amount of the non-native species.

Cheatgrass out-competes native grasses by establishing a deep root system that grows early in the summer robbing the moisture that is needed by other species. It then dies in a thick mass that becomes fuel for large, intense wildfires. The invasion of cheatgrass over large swaths of the West is one of the reasons we have more large fires.

Below is an excerpt from an article in the New York Times about the work being done by Ann Kennedy of the Agricultural Research Service.

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“…Dr. Kennedy’s hunt for a cheatgrass killer has been nearly 30 years in the making. In 1986, she was investigating yellowed wheat in the Palouse country of eastern Washington State when she found some bacteria that appeared to inhibit the number of shoots that the wheat sent skyward, but not the wheat plant’s overall yield; the plant just made bigger kernels. Dr. Kennedy wondered if a bacterium could be used to frustrate weeds instead.

With help from undergraduates at Washington State University, where she is an adjunct professor, Dr. Kennedy tested 25,000 bacteria she took from nearby farm fields. Her goal was to find ones that satisfied a wish list of ideal attributes such as hindering cheatgrass while not affecting wheat. She likened the search to picky online dating.

The researcher finally settled on two strains of Pseudomonas fluorescens, a huge species of bacteria that is present throughout the natural world. Most of its strains perform beneficial functions in the environment.

In long-term field trials around the inland Pacific Northwest, including Hanford Reach National Monument in Washington State, Dr. Kennedy’s bacteria reduced the amount of cheatgrass in test plots by about half within three years of a single application.

“We get it down to near zero weeds within about five or six years,” Dr. Kennedy said, as other plants recover and grow more competitive. The bacteria also dispatch two other invasive plants, medusahead and jointed goatgrass. The latest findings will be published within the next year, she said…”

Researchers attempt to quantify how climate change will affect wildfire seasons

Future Very Large Fires wildfires
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.

climate change predicted fire seasons

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.

BlueSky Modeling Framework

BlueSky screen grab
Screen grab from a BlueSky animation.

The U.S. Forest Service has developed a system called BlueSky Modeling Framework using multiple models that when combined in various configurations can enable:

  • the lookup of fuels information from fuel maps
  • the calculation of total and hourly fire consumption based on fuel loadings and weather information
  • the calculation of speciated emissions (such as CO2 or PM2.5) from a fire
  • the calculation of vertical plume profiles produced by a fire
  • the calculation of likely trajectories of smoke parcels given off by a fire
  • the calculation of downstream smoke concentrations.

The image above is a screen grab from a Beta website of an animation of a 3-hour running average of PM 2.5 using modeled fires. (Don’t ask me to explain it any further than that!)

More information about the system is HERE. You can configure your own animation at THIS SITE.

Time-lapse of monitors setting up a fire effects plot

The Fire Effects crew from North Cascades National Park is seen in this time-lapse video filmed over a two-hour period placing fire monitoring plots just outside fire perimeter of the Paradise Fire in Olympic National Park.

The fire that started May 15 in the Olympic peninsula rain forest has burned 1,781 acres.

I wonder to what degree the intensive human activity in the plot while establishing it affects the results.