A team of scientists from the University of California, Irvine reported in the journal Nature Communications that human-caused fires in California are more ferocious than fires caused by lightning. The research could help scientists better understand fire severity and how likely a fire is to kill trees.
In 2020 alone, over 4 million acres were burned in California, including the million-acre August Complex Fire. It was not clear if there was a difference in severity between the natural fires and the ones touched off by humans.
The co-author of the book said that human-ignited fires grow more rapidly and release more energy as they grow. They are more ferocious.
In contrast, lightning-strike blazes tend to occur in weather with higher humidity, which can limit the fire's intensity.
Scientists were able to understand the forces that govern how fast fires move thanks to the work done by the UCI. A new study detailing those advances was published.
In the past nine fire seasons in California, the Department of Earth System Science created a fire tracking algorithm that helped analyze the location, energy and spread of fires.
Chen and colleagues looked at thermal hot spots from fire activity with an imager on the Suomi satellite. This makes it possible to model and track wildfires.
The data has been available in the past for individual fires. It has not been available across all the fires in a region. This new product can help. The ability to identify where the fires burn fastest and how that relates to the weather and vegetation at a particular spot is provided by it.
It is the first time that scientists have been able to link a fire's speed and energy release to its long-term effects on the environment. It could allow us to build better fire models in California and better track wildfires in parts of the world where we don't have aircraft and multiple satellite sensors. This could be useful for understanding fire behavior in the understory of tropical forests.
Increasing fire severity is related to more and more property damage, firefighter deaths, and poor air quality in California. The data for the Caldor fire was created by Douglas Morton and Cynthia Starr. Several communities in the Sierra Nevada mountains were devastated by the two fires. The data visualization shows how quickly fire behavior can change from day-to-day variations in weather and the fires burning into new areas.
Researchers from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of Bogot, and the University of the United Kingdom contributed to the studies.
More information: Stijn Hantson et al, Human-ignited fires result in more extreme fire behavior and ecosystem impacts, Nature Communications (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-30030-2The California wildfire spread from VIIRS satellite observations to Scientific Data. The DOI is 10.1038/s416122-01343-0.
Journal information: Nature Communications , Scientific Data
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