![]() ![]() They concluded that the number of large blazes had increased since the early 1980s. Last year, the National Climate Assessment-written by a panel of scientists in the military, federal civilian agencies, and private universities-reviewed the complete scientific literature on climate change and wildfires. What has been “reinforced this year and last,” Williams said, is that there’s even more evidence “that a warming climate strongly promotes increases in forest fire activity in western North America.”Īs if there wasn’t enough evidence of that. “Even the Earth-system models used to project climate/land-cover changes for the next century do this.” But extreme air temperatures may overwhelm that effect, leading us to undercount future fire risk. “We tend to think of fire danger as being a function of the drought status of an area,” Williams said. It also means that wildfires may become harder to predict during the preceding winter and spring. The literature suggests that wildfires are more driven by the temperature and moisture content in the air than by the moisture content in the soil, Williams said. (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced the record on Wednesday, after Williams and I corresponded.)ĭeath Valley also endured the hottest month ever recorded on Earth, averaging 108.1 degrees Fahrenheit (or 42.3 degrees Celsius) across day and night. The state as a whole was 5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal. Even if the deep soils are wet following winter and spring, a hot and dry atmosphere seems to be able to overwhelm that effect.”Īs it turned out, July 2018 was the hottest month in California ever recorded. “Last summer was record-breaking, or near record-breaking, hot across much of the West, and I believe July 2018 will break records or come close to it again this year. “The factor that clearly made the difference in 2017, and again in 2018, is heat,” Williams said. So if forests had plenty of moisture in early June, how did they become tinderboxes by late July? Soil-moisture levels are estimated across the continental United States. National Soil-Moisture Map, as of June 2018 “But some, including where the Carr fire is, are not even near record-breaking dry.” “The areas where we’ve been seeing big fires this year are generally dry,” he said. ![]() The following map, for instance, shows how soil-moisture levels in June 2018 compared to early summer moisture over the past 120 years. “Last year and this year we’ve seen giant outbreaks of fires in areas where you wouldn’t have expected it based on the soil-moisture balance,” Williams said in an email. But both seasons turned out to be anything but. Both fire seasons, therefore, should have subdued. And in 2017, the spring rains were enormous and excessive. Park Williams, a professor of biology and environment at Columbia University, told me that a wet spring normally makes for a calmer fire season. Six of the 10 largest wildfires in the state’s history have occurred in the past decade, and all but one of them have happened this century.īut there’s something strange about these fires. 2017 was the state’s costliest, most destructive wildfire season. There would be little precedent for this year’s fire season in California-if the last few years hadn’t been wretched as well. “These fires are frightening to watch, even from space,” he said on Twitter. The Carr and Ferguson wildfires, as glimpsed earlier this month by the astronaut Alexander Gerst. More effective have been photographs taken by astronauts aboard the International Space Station: Feeds have filled with images of infernal flames, burned-out hillsides, and the state’s low-flying, dive-bombing, firefighting 747-but single pictures can provide no sense of scale. Press photos can’t take stock of this destruction. Army to fight the Carr fire,” Scott Stephens, a fire ecologist at UC Berkeley, told The Washington Post. The Carr Fire, a massive blaze that has killed eight people, is already the sixth-most destructive fire in the state’s history. ![]() Some of the “smaller” fires this year would have once made history. Sixteen other blazes, requiring 14,000 firefighters, are devouring woodlands elsewhere in California. The Holy Fire has forced 20,000 people to leave their homes. The Mendocino Complex Fire is the largest wildfire in the state’s history, with nearly 500 square miles burned. ![]() How bad is California’s current fire season? ![]()
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