Climate change will increase fire risk and lengthen fire seasons, study confirms

Wildfires are some of the worst natural disasters in the country, threatening lives, destroying homes and infrastructure, and polluting the air. In order to effectively predict and manage fires, managers need to understand fire hazards and allocate resources accordingly. A new study contributes scientific knowledge to this effort.

Inside the researchpublished in the November issue of the journal Future of the world, researchers from DRI, Argonne National Laboratory, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, worked together to assess the risk of fire in the future.

They looked at four fire indices used in North America to predict and manage fire risk to see how risk was associated with observed fire frequency between 1984 and 2019. Climate change is likely to cause fires and longer fire seasons.

“We use many of these fire risk data to assess fire risk in the US,” said Guo Yu, Ph.D., assistant research professor at DRI and the author of the study. “But previous studies have only looked at how climate change will change the risk of fire using one of these factors, and only a few studies have looked at how the risk will change. fire in the quantity or quality of fire engines. paper.”

Fire hazard indicators use information about weather conditions and the moisture content of the oil or dry vegetation on the ground. The most common fire danger indices used in North America are the USGS Fire Potential Index, the Canadian Forest Fire Weather Index, and the Energy Release Component and Burning Indices from the National Fire Danger Rating. System.

First, scientists used remote sensing data from 1984 to 2019 to see how fire risk was related to wildfire size for more than 13,000 wildfires, excluding wildfires. . They found that when the risk of fire is high, the size of the fire is likely to be larger, and this relationship is stronger in larger areas.

By incorporating wildfire risk data into future climate models, the study found that wildfire risk will increase by an average of 10 days in the continental United States by the end of the century. , is increased by high temperature.

Some regions, such as the southern Great Plains (including Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas), are projected to have more than 40 additional days per year of fire danger. A few regions are expected to see their annual fire season shorten due to increased rainfall and moisture, including the Pacific Northwest and mid-Atlantic. .

In the Southwest, the severe fire season is projected to increase to more than 20 days a year, most of which occur in the spring and summer months. Long fire seasons that extend into the winter months are also expected, especially for the Texas-Louisiana coast.

“Under a warmer climate in the future, we can see that the fire will be higher in winter,” said Yu. “This surprised me because you feel uncertain, but climate change will change the landscape in many ways.”

The authors of the study hope that the study will help fire managers to understand how many fires they may be able to prepare accordingly, as well as to understand how the fire season changes and extends down the climate change.