Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory used artificial intelligence to analyze the climate and wildfire data and estimate the role of climate change and other factors in the increasing numbers of wildfires in the US.
They found that human-induced climate change has been the key driving force in the wildfires in the country for over two decades. They noted that the fire seasons in recent years might be only the beginning of what will come in the future due to climate change, and the world might not be prepared for it.
Siberia wildfires on July 4, 2021. Image acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. With labels.
Climate Change is Turning Up the Heat
Wildfires are getting bigger and more destructive each year, and scientists say that one of its main driving forces is climate change. The Wilderness Society has intensified drought seasons, reduced the mountaintop snow peak, fire seasons are longer, and more lightning strikes are recorded that trigger big fires in dry forests.
Unfortunately, these trends are not about to change on their own due to global warming that has worsened for the last 40 years. Many places vulnerable to extreme weather are further exposed to danger as the world continues to heat up.
For instance, 15 of the 20 biggest fires in California's history happened in the last two decades since 2000. Data projections also reveal that big wildfires covering more than 25,000 acres could become 50% more frequent by the end of the century.
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Human-Induced Climate Change Key Driving Force to Increased Wildfires
The factors that have caused the increased numbers of wildfire events in the country have been the subject of debate of how much of it was caused by human-induced climate change and how much can be explained by natural causes.
In the study, titled "Human-Caused Climate Change Is Now a Key Driver of Forest Fire Activity in the Western United States," published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers applied artificial intelligence to climate and wildfire data to estimate the roles that climate change and other factors play in the wildfire risk called vapor pressure deficit (VPD).
Phys.org reported that VPD measures the amount of moisture the air can hold when it is saturated minus the amount of moisture in the air. Researchers noted that the higher the VPD, the higher moisture air could draw from sol and plants. Large wildfire-burned areas tend to have high VPDs, which is associated with warm, dry air.
Researchers found that 68% of the increase in VPD across the western US from 1979 to 2020 was likely due to human-induced global warming, while the remaining 32% was due to natural changes in weather patterns.
Therefore, the researchers concluded that human-induced climate change is the key driver of increasing fire weather in the western US. More so, their analysis on the August Complex wildfire of 2020 showed that human-induced warming explains the 50% of the unprecedented high VPD in the region during the wildfire started.
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