Achieving sustainable coexistence with wildfires in the Anthropocene requires skilful integrated fire observations, fire behaviour predictions, forecasts of fire risk, and projections of change to fire climates.
Background Wildland fire in arid and semi-arid (dryland) regions can intensify when climatic, biophysical, and land-use factors increase fuel load and continuity.
Increasing wildfire activity in forests worldwide has driven urgency in understanding current and future fire regimes. Spatial patterns of area burned at high severity strongly shape forest resilience and constitute a key dimension of fire regimes, yet remain difficult to predict.
As wildfire risks have elevated due to climate change, the health risks that toxicants from fire smoke pose to wildland firefighters have been exacerbated. Recently, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has reclassified wildland firefighters’ occupational exposure as carcinogenic to humans (Group 1).
Smoke from wildfires presents one of the greatest threats to air quality, public health, and ecosystems in the United States, especially in the West. Here we quantify the efficacy of prescribed burning as an intervention for mitigating smoke exposure downwind of wildfires across the West during the 2018 and 2020 fire seasons.
Biodiversity is in chronic decline, and extreme events – such as wildfires – can add further episodes of acute losses. Fires of increasing magnitude will often overwhelm response capacity, and decision-makers need to make choices about what to protect. Conventionally, such choices prioritise human life then infrastructure then biodiversity.
Post-fire flooding is of significant concern in the U.S. Southwest, where burned areas can drastically alter local hydrology to increase the risk of floods and debris flows, posing new and dynamic flood risk to communities downslope that necessitate coordinated response across jurisdictional boundaries.
The wildfire season in the Western United States (U.S.) was anomalously large in 2020, with a majority of burned area due to lightning ignitions resulting in overall fire emissions of carbon monoxide (CO) in the Western region almost 3 times the 2001–2019 average. We used the Community Atmosphere Model version 6 with Chemistry (CAM-chem) to investigate how the 2020 fires in the Western U.S.
Background: Previously established correlations of flame length L with fireline intensity IB are based on theory and data which showed that flame zone depth D of a line fire could be neglected if L was much greater than D. Aims: We evaluated this correlation for wildland fires where D is typically a non-negligible proportion of L (i.e. roughly L/D < ~2).
Agricultural production in the western United States relies on water supplies from mountain source-water systems that are sensitive to impacts from wildfire and a changing climate. The resultant challenges to water supply forecasting directly impact agricultural producers and irrigation managers who rely on snowmelt and streamflow forecasts for crop selection and irrigation scheduling.