Research Database
Displaying 21 - 40 of 114
Metals in Wildfire Suppressants
Year: 2024
Frequent and severe wildfires have led to increased application of fire suppression products (long-term fire retardants, water enhancers, and Class A foams) in the American West. While fire suppressing products used on wildfires must be approved by theU.S. Forest Service, portions of their formulations are trade secrets.Increased metals content in soils and surface waters at the wildland-urban interface has been observed after wildfires but has primarily been attributed to ash deposition or anthropogenic impact from nearby urban areas. In this study, metal concentrations in several fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Near-term fire weather forecasting in the Pacific Northwest using 500-hPa map types
Year: 2024
BackgroundNear-term forecasts of fire danger based on predicted surface weather and fuel dryness are widely used to support the decisions of wildfire managers. The incorporation of synoptic-scale upper-air patterns into predictive models may provide additional value in operational forecasting.AimsIn this study, we assess the impact of synoptic-scale upper-air patterns on the occurrence of large wildfires and widespread fire outbreaks in the US Pacific Northwest. Additionally, we examine how discrete upper-air map types can augment subregional models of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Human driven climate change increased the likelihood of the 2023 record area burned in Canada
Year: 2024
In 2023, wildfires burned 15 million hectares in Canada, more than doubling the previous record. These wildfires caused a record number of evacuations, unprecedented air quality impacts across Canada and the northeastern United States, and substantial strain on fire management resources. Using climate models, we show that human-induced climate change significantly increased the likelihood of area burned at least as large as in 2023 across most of Canada, with more than two-fold increases in the east and southwest. The long fire season was more than five times as likely and the large areas…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Predicting daily firefighting personnel deployment trends in the western United States
Year: 2024
Projected increases in wildfire frequency, size, and severity may further stress already scarce firefighting resources in the western United States that are in high demand. Machine learning is a promising field with the ability to model firefighting resource usage without compromising dataset size or complexity. In this study, the Categorical Boosting (CatBoost) model was used with historical (2012-2020) wildfire data to train three models that calculate predicted daily counts of 1) total assigned personnel (total personnel), 2) assigned personnel that are at the fire (ground personnel), and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Forest thinning and prescribed burning treatments reduce wildfire severity and buffer the impacts of severe fire weather
Year: 2024
BackgroundThe capacity of forest fuel treatments to moderate the behavior and severity of subsequent wildfires depends on weather and fuel conditions at the time of burning. However, in-depth evaluations of how treatments perform are limited because encounters between wildfires and areas with extensive pre-fire data are rare. Here, we took advantage of a 1200-ha randomized and replicated experiment that burned almost entirely in a subsequent wildfire under a wide range of weather conditions. We compared the impacts of four fuel treatments on fire severity, including two thin-only, a thin-burn…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The Interannual Variability of Global Burned Area Is Mostly Explained by Climatic Drivers
Year: 2024
Better understanding how fires respond to climate variability is an issue of current interest in light of ongoing climate change. However, evaluating the global-scale temporal variability of fires in response to climate presents a challenge due to the intricate processes at play and the limitation of fire data. Here, we investigate the links between year-to-year variability of burned area (BA) and climate using BA data, the Fire Weather Index (FWI), and the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) from 2001 to 2021 at ecoregion scales. Our results reveal complex spatial…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Backfire: the settler-colonial logic and legacy of Smokey Bear
Year: 2024
Since the 1940s, the United States Forest Service’s (USFS) national fire suppression efforts have been bolstered by a public-facing ad campaign led by the Ad Council, most notably through the iconic rise of Smokey Bear. The consequences of decades of strict fire suppression, promulgated and solidified by this highly successful campaign, have been ecologically disastrous, and especially detrimental for fire-dependent Indigenous communities and ecosystems. Scholars have examined the Smokey campaign’s racialized, nationalist discourse, yet none have grappled with the campaign’s settler colonial…
Publication Type: Journal Article
External drivers of changes in wildland firefighter safety policies and practices
Year: 2024
Background: Firefighter safety is a top priority in wildland fire response and management. Existing explanations emphasise how land management agency initiatives to change organisational culture, usually inspired by fatality incidents, contribute to changes both in formal safety policies and informal safety practices. Aims: This paper identifies external factors that lead to changes in wildland firefighter safety policies and practices. Methods: This paper uses qualitative data from a long-term ethnographic research project. Data include…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Record-breaking fire weather in North America in 2021 was initiated by the Pacific northwest heat dome
Year: 2024
The 2021 North American wildfire season was marked by record breaking fire-conducive weather and widespread synchronous burning, extreme fire behaviour, smoke and evacuations. Relative to 1979–2021, the greatest number of temperature and vapor pressure deficit records were broken in 2021, and in July alone, 3.2 million hectares burned in Canada and the United States. These events were catalyzed by an intense heat dome that formed in late June over western North America that synchronized fire danger, challenging fire suppression efforts. Based on analysis of persistent positive anomalies of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Association of social vulnerability factors with power outage burden in Washington state: 2018–2021
Year: 2024
Major power outages have risen over the last two decades, largely due to more extreme weather conditions. However, there is a lack of knowledge on the distribution of power outages and its relationship to social vulnerability and co-occurring hazards. We examined the associations between localized outages and social vulnerability factors (demographic characteristics), controlling for environmental factors (weather), in Washington State between 2018–2021. We additionally analyzed the validity of PowerOutage.us data compared to federal datasets. The population included 27 counties served by 14…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Visibility-informed mapping of potential firefighter lookout locations using maximum entropy modelling
Year: 2024
BackgroundSituational awareness is an essential component of wildland firefighter safety. In the US, crew lookouts provide situational awareness by proxy from ground-level locations with visibility of both fire and crew members.AimsTo use machine learning to predict potential lookout locations based on incident data, mapped visibility, topography, vegetation, and roads.MethodsLidar-derived topographic and fuel structural variables were used to generate maps of visibility across 30 study areas that possessed lookout location data. Visibility…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Trends in prescribed fire weather windows from 2000 to 2022 in California
Year: 2024
As increasing wildfire activity puts pressure on wildland fire suppression resources both nationally and within the state of California, further development of programs and infrastructure that emphasize preventative fuels treatments, e.g. prescribed burning, is critical for mitigating the impacts of wildfire at large spatial scales. Among many factors that limit the use of prescribed fire, weather and fuel moisture conditions are among the most critical. We analyzed a 2-km gridded hourly surface weather dataset over a 23-yr period to explore the relationship between climatological trends and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Multiple social and environmental factors affect wildland fire response of full or less-than-full suppression
Year: 2024
Wildland fire incident commanders make wildfire response decisions within an increasingly complex socio-environmental context. Threats to human safety and property, along with public pressures and agency cultures, often lead commanders to emphasize full suppression. However, commanders may use less-than-full suppression to enhance responder safety, reduce firefighting costs, and encourage beneficial effects of fire. This study asks: what management, socioeconomic, environmental, and fire behavior characteristics are associated with full suppression and the less-than-full suppression methods…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Mental Health and Traumatic Occupational Exposure in Wildland Fire Dispatchers
Year: 2024
Wildland fire dispatchers play a key role in wildland fire management and response organization; however, to date, wildland fire studies have largely focused on the physical hazards and, to a lesser extent, mental health hazards of wildland firefighting operational personnel, and dispatcher studies have primarily focused on 911 and police dispatchers. Studies of other dispatchers have provided some limited insight into potential strains impacting this workforce, including work-related fatigue, burnout, and traumatic exposure. However, the specific job hazards that are faced by wildland fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Canada Under Fire – Drivers and Impacts of the Record-Breaking 2023 Wildfire Season
Year: 2024
The 2023 wildfire season in Canada was unprecedented in its scale and intensity. Spanning from late April to early November and extending across much of the forested regions of Canada, the season resulted in a record-breaking total area burned of approximately 15 million hectares, over seven times the historic national annual average. The impacts were profound with more than 200 communities evacuated (approximately 232,000 people), periods of dense smoke that caused significant public health concerns, and unprecedented demands on fire-fighting resources. The exceptional area burned can be…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Probabilistic Forecasting of Lightning Strikes over the Continental USA and Alaska: Model Development and Verification
Year: 2024
Lightning is responsible for the most area annually burned by wildfires in the extratropical region of the Northern Hemisphere. Hence, predicting the occurrence of wildfires requires reliable forecasting of the chance of cloud-to-ground lightning strikes during storms. Here, we describe the development and verification of a probabilistic lightning-strike algorithm running on a uniform 20 km grid over the continental USA and Alaska. This is the first and only high-resolution lightning forecasting model for North America derived from 29-year-long data records. The algorithm consists of a large…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Lightning-Ignited Wildfires in the Western United States: Ignition Precipitation and Associated Environmental Conditions
Year: 2023
Cloud-to-ground lightning with minimal rainfall (“dry” lightning) is a major wildfire ignition source in the western United States (WUS). Although dry lightning is commonly defined as occurring with <2.5 mm of daily-accumulated precipitation, a rigorous quantification of precipitation amounts concurrent with lightning-ignited wildfires (LIWs) is lacking. We combine wildfire, lightning and precipitation data sets to quantify these ignition precipitation amounts across ecoprovinces of the WUS. The median precipitation for all LIWs is 2.8 mm but varies with vegetation and fire characteristics…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Drivers of California’s changing wildfires: a state-of-the-knowledge synthesis
Year: 2023
Over the past four decades, annual area burned has increased significantly in California and across the western USA. This trend reflects a confluence of intersecting factors that affect wildfire regimes. It is correlated with increasing temperatures and atmospheric vapour pressure deficit. Anthropogenic climate change is the driver behind much of this change, in addition to influencing other climate-related factors, such as compression of the winter wet season. These climatic trends and associated increases in fire activity are projected to continue into the future. Additionally, factors…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Landscape‑scale fuel treatment effectiveness: lessons learned from wildland fire case studies in forests of the western United States and Great Lakes region
Year: 2023
Background Maximizing the effectiveness of fuel treatments at landscape scales is a key research and management need given the inability to treat all areas at risk from wildfire. We synthesized information from case studies that documented the influence of fuel treatments on wildfire events. We used a systematic review to identify relevant case studies and extracted information through a series of targeted questions to summarize experiential knowledge of landscape fuel treatment effectiveness. Within a larger literature search, we identified 18 case study reports that included (1) manager…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Examining the influence of mid-tropospheric conditions and surface wind changes on extremely large fires and fire growth days
Year: 2023
Background: Previous work by the author and others has examined weather associated with growth of exceptionally large fires (‘Fires of Unusual Size’, or FOUS), looking at three of four factors associated with critical fire weather patterns: antecedent drying, high wind and low humidity. However, the authors did not examine atmospheric stability, the fourth factor. Aims: This study examined the relationships of mid-tropospheric stability and dryness used in the Haines Index, and changes in surface wind speed or direction, to growth of FOUS. Methods. Weather measures were paired with daily…
Publication Type: Journal Article