Quantifying increased fire risk in California in response to different levels of warming and drying
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Quantifying increased fire risk in California in response to different levels of warming and drying Shahrbanou Madadgar1 • Mojtaba Sadegh2 • Felicia Chiang1 • Elisa Ragno1,3 • Amir AghaKouchak1 Accepted: 23 September 2020 Ó Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Warming temperatures and severe droughts have contributed to increasing fire activity in California. Decadal average summer temperature in California has increased by 0.8 °C during 1984–2014, while the decadal total size of large fires has expanded by a factor of 2.5. This study proposes a multivariate probabilistic approach for quantifying changes to fire risk given different climatic conditions. Our results indicate that the risk of large fires in California increases substantially in response to unit degree changes in summer temperature. The probability of annual mean fire size exceeding its long-term average increases by 30% when summer temperature anomaly increases by 1 °C (from -0.5 °C to ? 0.5 °C). Furthermore, the probability of annual average fire size exceeding its long-term average doubles when the annual precipitation decreases from the 75th (wet) to the 25th (dry) percentile. The proposed model can help manage fire-prone regions where fire activity is expected to intensify under projected global warming. Keywords Wildfire Drought Global warming Copula
1 Introduction Wildfire activity in the western United States is strongly associated with precedent regional climate conditions (Westerling et al. 2006; Keeley 2004). Frequent droughts and increasing seasonal and annual temperatures (Abatzoglou and Williams 2016) in the past few decades have contributed to the increasing frequency and size of wildfires in the region (Littell et al. 2009; Miller et al. 2009; Abatzoglou et al. 2020; Goss et al. 2020), resulting in substantial repercussions on
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00477-020-01885-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. & Amir AghaKouchak [email protected] 1
Department of of Civil & Environmental Engineering, Department of Earth System Sciences, E/4130 Engineering Gateway, University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA
2
Boise State University, ERB 4147, Boise, ID 83725-2060, USA
3
Department of Hydraulic Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Stevinweg 1, 2628CN Delft, The Netherlands
ecosystems (Thompson et al. 2011) and human health (Bowman and Johnston 2005). Fire size and burn area are two terminologies closely related to one another that have been frequently used in the literature; latter (burn area) refers to exterior boundaries of the area burned and might include islands of unburned land, whereas former (fire size) refers to the area that experienced fire and does not include unburned islands (Dennison et al. 2014). In the western United States, the number of fires larger than 4 km2 has grown at a rate of seven fires per year (Eidenshink et al. 2007) and the cumula
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