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Tag: research

Researchers conclude climate change may eliminate forests in Yellowstone area

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , 1 Comment on Researchers conclude climate change may eliminate forests in Yellowstone area
Arnica_fire_1846_09-24
Arnica fire in Yellowstone National Park, September 24, 2009

A group of five researchers studying climate change in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem (GYE) have concluded that higher temperatures will lead to more frequent fires, changing the fire return interval from 100-300 years to less than 30 years. This would prevent the current suite of conifer species from regenerating and result in them being replaced with nonforest vegetation.  This is expected to occur by mid-century.

From the abstract:

Our findings suggest a shift to novel fire–climate–vegetation relationships in Greater Yellowstone by midcentury because fire frequency and extent would be inconsistent with persistence of the current suite of conifer species.

Holy crap! By the time you or your children are applying for Medicare, there may be very few trees left in Yellowstone National Park.

Here are their findings:

Conclusions

Continued warming could completely transform GYE fire regimes by the mid-21st century, with profound consequences for many species and for ecosystem services including aesthetics, hydrology, and carbon storage. The conditions associated with extreme fire seasons are expected to become much more frequent, with fire occurrence and area burned exceeding that observed in the historical record or reconstructed from paleoproxy records for the past 10,000 y. Even in years without extreme fire events, average annual area burned is projected to increase, and years with no large fires—common until recently—are projected to become increasingly rare. The timing and spatial location of such changes varied somewhat among the three GCMs used in this study, but the models converged by the latter part of the century. The magnitude of predicted increases in fire occurrence and area burned suggests that there is a real likelihood of Yellowstone’s forests being converted to nonforest vegetation during the mid-21st century because reduced fire intervals would likely preclude postfire tree regeneration. A change in dominant vegetation would also cause the GYE to shift from a climate- to a fuellimited fire regime (24). We suggest that the climate–fire system is a tipping element that may qualitatively change the flora, fauna, and ecosystem processes in this landscape and could be indicative of similar changes in other subalpine or boreal forests.

The paper can be found at PNAS.org and was written by Anthony L. Westerling, Monica G. Turner, Erica A. H. Smithwick, William H. Romme, and Michael G. Ryan. The title is Continued warming could transform Greater Yellowstone fire regimes by mid-21st century.

In August, 2009 we wrote an article that criticized the U.S. Government for funding research, but publishing the results in privately owned publications which charge substantial fees for access to the government-bought research findings. We are very pleased to report that the paper described above is published as an “open access article” so that, as far as we know, anyone with an internet connection can read it.

Related articles:

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Smoke from Fourmile fire provides bonanza for researchers, bad news for firefighters and the public

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , , ,
smoke in Moscow
A woman wears a mask in central Moscow to "protect" herself from smoke from fires outside the city. August, 2010. Photograph: Mikhail Voskresensky/Reuters

When the Fourmile Canyon fire was burning west of Boulder, Colorado in September, 2010, Jim Roberts, a chemist with NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, was surrounded by something he had previously studied at the U.S. Forest Service’s Missoula Fire Science Laboratory in Montana — smoke, and lots of it. In Missoula he used a new instrument they had built, a custom mass spectrometer, to examine the levels of isocyanic acid in the atmosphere and in smoke. Isocyanic acid has been difficult to detect with conventional measurement techniques. At Missoula, he measured the levels of the chemical in smoke generated when the researchers burned vegetation in the lab and in cigarette smoke.

When the Fourmile Canyon fire started, Roberts had the mass spectrometer at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.

Here is an excerpt from the Daily Camera:

Isocyanic acid easily dissolves in water, which makes it possible for the acid to also dissolve into moist tissues in the body, including the lungs. The full health effects of exposure to isocyanic acid in the air aren’t fully understood, but the chemical has been linked to cataracts, cardiovascular disease and rheumatoid arthritis.

Last September, the researchers had the opportunity to measure the presence of the acid in a real wildfire. On Labor Day, the Fourmile Fire began burning in the foothills west of Boulder, just a few miles upwind of the state-of-the-art atmospheric instruments housed at NOAA’s campus on Broadway.

“Boulder has a world-class atmospheric chemistry building and only once in its lifetime is it going to have a full-on hit from a wildfire,” said Joost de Gouw, a co-author of the study and a researcher at the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Science. “So just everyone in that building turned on their instruments.”

CIRES is a joint institute of the University of Colorado and NOAA.

The sensitive new spectrometer used in Missoula also picked up the isocyanic acid in the plume of smoke from the Fourmile Fire.

More information

Fourmile fire near Boulder
Smoke from the Fourmile fire as imaged by the MODIS satellite on September 6, 2010.

The future of wildland fire smoke research

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , , 2 Comments on The future of wildland fire smoke research

JFSP smoke research planThe Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP) has released their plan for wildland fire smoke research. The 58-page document outlines their priorities for funding smoke research through 2015.

Much of the emphasis appears to be directed at how to deal with the public’s perception and tolerance of smoke. Smoke is becoming an increasingly sensitive subject to the population due to larger wildfires burning for longer periods of time, concern about the effects of wildfire smoke on global warming, and prescribed fires continuing to be an important tool for land managers.

One aspect of wildfire smoke that Wildfire Today has written about frequently is the short and long term effects of smoke on the health of firefighters. On April 23, 2010 we covered the study that NIOSH and the U.S. Fire Administration are conducting about cancer among structural firefighters. We called out the land management agencies and the firefighting associations:

There needs to be a concerted effort to conduct a similar study on wildland firefighters. It should be led by a physician/epidemiologist and should evaluate the long term health and occurrence of cancer and other diseases among wildland firefighters. There is a lot of grant money out there and it should be possible to get some of it pointed towards this overlooked niche of firefighting.

Followups to that article are HERE and HERE.

The JFSP five-year plan does mention research on the effects of smoke on wildland firefighters, but at times it seems like an afterthought. For example, the objective for one of four research themes, “Smoke and Populations”, sometimes includes the “impact of smoke on populations” (page 26), and in other places it is described as “impact of smoke on populations and fire fighters” (page 21).

However, the plan does list some specific “Smoke Science Foci” that may benefit firefighters:

  • 2011: (SSP T3 -2): Epidemiological research/literature review to determine human health risk from high PM loadings.
  • 2011 (SSP T3-4): Fire fighter smoke health hazards: trends in health and exposure.
  • 2012 (SSP T3-5): Review of epidemiological research to determine human health risk from high PM, high ozone and high aromatic hydrocarbon loadings with a focus on synergisms between pollutants.

We hope that the “foci” turns into actual research.

Natural Inquirer: natural resources for middle schools

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags

The U.S. Forest Service has been producing a natural resources science journal for middle schools, called “Natural Inquirer”, since 1998. Here is a description of the publication from their web site:

Natural Inquirer description

Each journal contains articles on a variety of subjects, usually centered around one theme. Many editions also have word puzzles, questions (or “reflections”) for the students to consider, and lesson plans for teachers.

One of the lesson plans calls for groups of four students get together and write letters to USFS researchers, with each letter having four questions for the researcher about the article they just read. It makes you wonder what kind of workload this places on the researchers when they receive hundreds or thousands of letters, each with four questions for them.

The publications introduce the researchers and scientists to the middle schoolers in a “Meet the Scientists” section, which has their photos and some personal information, such as “my favorite science experience”, for example, “climbing into the top of a 175-foot-tall red fir to collect lichen samples during a wind storm”, or riding my motorcycle 2,000 miles to attend the 9th World Wilderness Congress in southern Mexico. This purpose of this may be to have the students identify with the scientists, for science research to appear to be something that normal humans can actually do, to have the students take more science courses, or to even consider natural resources research for a career. Or, all of the above.

There have been two editions of the journal that focused on wildland fire. The first was Spring, 2003, and the other was Summer, 2010.

The latter contains an article titled “Trust Is a Must: What Is Involved in Trusting Those Who Manage Forest Fires?” (page 41). It asks the middle schoolers a question:

Do you think forest managers can do a better job if citizens trust them? Why or why not?

The Spring, 2003 edition had an interesting section on correlating weather measurements with large fire occurrence. It included this:

In the past, scientists thought that air temperature, relative humidity, dew point depression, and wind shear were the weather measurements most associated with large or dangerous wildfires. This research suggests that dew point depression is the most important measurement. On days when large wildfires burned between 1971 and 1984, the dew point depression was high. When people try to predict wildfires based on weather conditions, they should pay the closest attention to dew point depression.

Below is the cover of the latest edition of the Natural Inquirer.

Continue reading “Natural Inquirer: natural resources for middle schools”

BYU researchers hope to fine-tune wildfire behavior models

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags
BYU fire research
Professor Thomas Fletcher and his students study fire behavior at BYU.

A chemical Engineering professor at Brigham Young University said the fire behavior model currently being used to predict the spread of wildfires “doesn’t have a lot of physics in it” and “it’s not as good as it could be”. Wildland firefighters have been using the Behave and BehavePlus fire modeling systems for decades.

Using grants from the U.S. Forest Service and the National Science Foundation, Thomas Fletcher expects to add several components to the existing models.

Here are some excerpts from an article on the BYU web site:

Most recently, Fletcher published an article in the International Journal of Wildland Fire detailing how a leaf can burn even with up to 50 percent of its moisture present. This previously unknown fact has serious ramifications for existing models, which often mistakenly factor in the additional time it takes for a leaf’s moisture to evaporate.

“Once a fire gets going, it doesn’t matter if you have wet leaves or bone-dry plants,” Fletcher said. “A big enough fire can ignite the leaves even though there still may be some moisture in the vegetation.”

Over the years, Fletcher and his team have focused on improving three aspects of fire models: the impact of moisture on fires, how wind affects flame and how flame spreads through shrubs.

“The model the fire boss usually runs on his laptop doesn’t have a lot of physics in it,” Fletcher said. “It runs fast and predicts something, but it’s not as good as it can be. We’re trying to improve that model so he can better understand where the fire is, where it’s going, which houses can be saved and where he can safely place firefighters.”

David Weise, supervisory research forester at the USDA Forest Service lab in Riverside, Calif., said Fletcher’s team complements others across the country working to improve the fire models.

“Tom’s fundamental work is providing us with information that can be used in our next generation of models,” Weise said. “The live fuels he’s working on are something we’ve found is important for us to look at, because our current models are dominated by dead fuels.”

Three articles written by Fletcher have been published in the International Journal of Wildland Fire, an official publication of the International Association of Wildland Fire.