Climate Change and Fire

Previous analyses identified large-scale climatic patterns contributing to greater fuel aridity as drivers of recent dramatic increases in wildfire activity throughout California. This study revisits an approach to investigate more local fire weather patterns in the northern Sierra Nevada; a region within California that has experienced exceptionally high wildfire activity recently.

Background: Lightning-caused fires have a driving influence on Canadian forests, being responsible for approximately half of all wildfires and 90% of the area burned.

Scenarios, or plausible characterizations of the future, can help natural resource stewards plan and act under uncertainty. Current methods for developing scenarios for climate change adaptation planning are often focused on exploring uncertainties in future climate, but new approaches are needed to better represent uncertainties in ecological responses.

Successful implementation of forest management as a nature-based climate solution is dependent on the durability of management-induced changes in forest carbon storage and sequestration.

Reports from western U.S. firefighters that nighttime fire activity has been increasing during the spans of many of their careers have recently been confirmed by satellite measurements over the 2003–20 period.

RATIONALE Wildfires have increased in frequency and intensity due to climate change and now contribute to nearly half of the annual average of fine particulate matter in the US. While the effects of short-term wildfire-PM_2.5 exposure on respiratory diseases are well-described, the impact of climate change on longer duration wildfire-PM_2.5 mortality is unknown.

Climate change has increased forest fire extent in temperate and boreal North America.

Wildfires exhibit extensive nonlinear characteristics and threshold effects in response to environmental changes. However, how threshold effects affect wildfire responses and their future changes remains unclear.

Vapor pressure deficit (VPD) is a driver of evaporative demand and correlates strongly with wildfire extent in the western United States (WUS). Vapor pressure deficit is the difference between saturation vapor pressure (es) and actual vapor pressure (ea).

Extreme fire spread events rapidly burn large areas with disproportionate impacts on people and ecosystems. Such events are associated with warmer and drier fire seasons and are expected to increase in the future.