The University of Washington is revolutionizing the way we predict local wildfires with a big-picture perspective that focuses on a critical root cause — climate.

Researchers at the University of Washington are working to help communities anticipate the fire season’s severity and take the appropriate steps to reduce fire hazards.

A Devastating Force
Wildfires are one of the most destructive forces in nature. In 2004, 6.8 million forest acres burned across the United States . Each year, an average of five firefighters die trying to control wildfires and the country spends billions of dollars fighting these natural disasters. And a single fire can wreak havoc on a community. In October 1991, the Oakland Hills fire in California killed 25 people and destroyed 1,500 acres and 2,900 structures.

Prof. David L. Peterson, director of the University’s Fire and Mountain Ecology Lab (www.cfr.washington.edu/research.fme), along with his colleagues in the College of Forest Resources and the university’s multi-disciplinary Climate Impacts Group are hard at work determining the relationship between wildfires and climate change. Their research has shown that wildfires are more predictable than once thought. Their work has led to an examination of the influence of climate change and climate variability on fire patterns in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. While current forecasting tools are limited to short-term predictions of fire weather, UW researchers believe that a greater understanding of large-scale oceanic and atmospheric patterns in the Pacific may improve our ability to predict fire weather farther into the future.

Developing Strategies
Understanding the past and present relationships between climate and fire is essential to developing strategies for managing fire-prone ecosystems. UW researchers with the Climate Impacts Group conducted tree-ring chronologies back to 1750 to reconstruct the Columbia River ’s flow, an indicator of drought conditions. They found that droughts were linked to specific atmospheric patterns in the Pacific Ocean, which were correlated to increased forest fire activity (read more at http://www.cses.washington.edu/cig/res/fe/fe.shtml).

UW researchers now project that future warming, exacerbated by human activities such as global fossil-fuel emissions, may at least double the average amount of land consumed by forest fires.

By determining that climate change is a primary driver of natural fires, researchers hold a key piece of information that may aid in the predictability of wildfires at a local level. Though causal climate patterns may originate thousands of miles away, they still have a strong effect on local weather patterns.

More about the UW College of Forest Resources and the Climate Impacts Group

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