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Climate Change and Fire

Displaying 1 - 10 of 275

Projections of Lightning-Ignited Wildfire Risk in the Western United States

Year of Publication
2025
Publication Type

Cloud-to-ground (CG) lightning is a major source of summer wildfire ignition in the western United States (WUS). However, future projections of lightning are uncertain since lightning is not directly simulated by most global climate models. To address this issue, we use convolutional neural network (CNN)-based parameterizations of daily June-September CG lightning.

Intensifying Fire Season Aridity Portends Ongoing Expansion of Severe Wildfire in Western US Forests

Year of Publication
2025
Publication Type

Area burned by wildfire has increased in western US forests and elsewhere over recent decades coincident with warmer and drier fire seasons. However, high–severity fire—fire that kills all or most trees—is arguably a more important metric of fire activity given its destabilizing influence on forest ecosystems and direct and indirect impacts to human communities.

Climate Change Effects on Interacting Disturbances in Forest Ecosystems

Year of Publication
2025
Publication Type

Drought, wildfire, wind, insects, and pathogens can interact across space and time to shape forest ecosystems. Although subdisciplines in ecology have long studied individual disturbances, their interactions remain poorly understood, particularly under climate change. Further, inconsistent terminology used to describe these interactions compounds this gap.

Anthropogenic warming drives earlier wildfire season onset in California

Year of Publication
2025
Publication Type

Annual wildfire area in California has rapidly grown in recent decades, with increasingly negative impacts on people. The fire season is also lengthening, with an earlier onset. This trend has been hypothesized to be driven by anthropogenic warming, but it has yet to be quantitatively attributed to climate drivers.

Wildfire and forest treatments mitigate–but cannot forestall–climate-driven changes in streamflow regimes in a western US mountain landscape

Year of Publication
2025
Publication Type

Warming temperatures and increasingly variable precipitation patterns are reducing winter snowpack and critical late-season streamflows. Here, we used two models (LANDIS-II and DHSVM) in linked simulations to evaluate the effects of wildfire and forest management scenarios on future snowpack and streamflow dynamics.