Few Fire Scientists Or Climatologists Surprised By This Year's Explosive Wildfires In CA, CO
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Despite what may look like a new world of wildfire, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of California, Los Angeles, said few climatologists and fire scientists have been surprised by the severity of the fires across the West this year. Federal wildfire forecasters predicted that it's "going to get bad really quickly, starting with Arizona, Utah and Colorado," Swain said. "And then the forecast was that Northern California would start getting bad in August and peak in the fall. Well, up through August, so far, that's looking like an awfully good prediction."
What's more, Swain said, the recent fires in the West fit into a trend of groundbreaking yet predictable wildfires around the world, as warming temperatures and diminishing moisture tip over fire regimes, the term fire scientists use to describe the typical timing, frequency, intensity and duration of wildfires on a given landscape. "If we go back, this feels like years ago, earlier in 2020, to Australia, all the experts there before that got bad said this looks like it could get bad," he said.
During 2019, the hottest and driest year on record in Australia, the usual early season rains didn't arrive, but extraordinary heat did. "And so places there burned intensely that wouldn't normally ever burn intensely," Swain said. He also pointed to more recent conflagrations in the Arctic, "a wildly different fire regime from either Australia, California or Colorado. That, too, is a region that has had extremely severe fire."
Siberia experienced unprecedented, 100-degree Fahrenheit temperatures and record-low soil moisture that drove epic fires, from the boreal forests to peatlands, swamps, permafrost and tundra In June. Some of what burned, Swain noted, is usually frozen through most of the year. "There's all sorts of examples of weird fire this year," Swain said.
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22082020/california-colorado-wildfires-climate-change-global-transformation