cont’d
Quote:We evaluated the causes and predictability of four extreme wildfire episodes from the 2024–2025 fire season, including in Northeast Amazonia (January–March 2024), the Pantanal–Chiquitano border regions of Brazil and Bolivia (August–September 2024), Southern California (January 2025), and the Congo Basin (July–August 2024).
Anomalous weather created conditions for these regional extremes, while fuel availability and human ignitions shaped spatial patterns and temporal fire dynamics.
In the three tropical regions, prolonged drought was the dominant fire enabler, whereas in California, extreme heat, wind, and antecedent fuel build-up were compounding enablers.
Our attribution analyses show that climate change made extreme fire weather in Northeast Amazonia 30–70 times more likely, increasing BA roughly 4-fold compared to a scenario without climate change. In the Pantanal–Chiquitano, fire weather was 4–5 times more likely, with 35-fold increases in BA.
Meanwhile, our analyses suggest that BA was 25 times higher in Southern California due to climate change. The Congo Basin's fire weather was 3–8 times more likely with climate change, with a 2.7-fold increase in BA.
Socioeconomic changes since the pre-industrial period, including land-use change, also likely increased BA in Northeast Amazonia.
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Anomalous weather created conditions for these regional extremes, while fuel availability and human ignitions shaped spatial patterns and temporal fire dynamics. Anomalous weather would be mainly absence of usual rain. Logging in the Amazon basin, removing deep-rooted large trees would contribute to the lack of rain. AGW may also be a cause for anomalous weather.
Human ignitions include arson but also careless use of welding and machinery in fire emergency areas. Human factors are not the only factors causing fires—dry lightning causes all fires in very remote areas.
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In the three tropical regions, prolonged drought was the dominant fire enabler, whereas in California, extreme heat, wind, and antecedent fuel build-up were compounding enablers. Because of AGW the fire season increases in length (State of the Climate report 2018) so removing fuel for wildfires by controlled burns becomes more difficult. Ways of removing wildfire fuel without burning would be nice
What is particularly bad is fuel that stretches vertically: bark hanging from a tree, a branch broken and resting on the ground while still partially attached to a trunk etc let fires jump from the ground to the crown then spread very quickly among the tree canopy.
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Our attribution analyses show that climate change made extreme fire weather in Northeast Amazonia 30–70 times more likely. . . .Not much to say about that. Hotter weather means more dry fuel for fires, less fire resistance/more flammable vegetation.
More later.
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Wildfires burning larger and larger areas. (Read 86 times)
