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AA convergence of dangerous weather conditions, exacerbated in the climate crisis, has set the stage to allow southerners to take advantage CaliforniaA new study predicts an increase in catastrophic wildfires in the future.
Southern California, home of 23 million people, has been largely spared from the same extreme fire escalation as the northern part of California. But models developed by researchers at University of California Los Angeles have predicted this will change.
Dry winds, low humidity, high temperatures and dry winds are the main drivers of wildfires in Southern California. The climate crisis is creating conditions that allow them to burn more frequently, faster, and hotter than before. Analyzing data from 49 climate stations located along the southern coast, from Santa Barbara to San Diego. the UCLA study found that the region could see double the number of what scientists call “large fire days” by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions are not curbed.
Even in a more moderate scenario, where heating is slowed, the researchers’ models showed a 60% increase in high-risk days compared with the late 20th century.
“Things are going to get worse,” Glen MacDonald, a professor of geography at UCLA and the lead author of the study, said.
The researchers analyzed a series of variables that can increase fire risks and found certain climatic characteristics – especially how dry the air is – usually determine when the biggest blazes erupt. “From that we found that you could sort of predict when you were going to have your large fire probability in southern California,” MacDonald said.
They then modeled how wildfire patterns might change over time. They found that not only will days get drier, but those days will start to show up earlier in the spring and stick around later into the autumn, thus “extending the probability to a greater part of the year”, he added. They concluded that these high-risk days would likely occur. Increase from 36 days per annum documented in the 1970s to late 1990s to 71 days by 2070
These conditions won’t just produce more fires – they will also affect fire behavior, making them more destructive and harder to contain.
Southern California’s landscapes, which are dominated by grassland and shrubland rather than large forests, burn and recover differently from Their northern neighbors. Decades of poor land management has led to the suppression of Indigenous practices such as prescribed burnings. Also left northern California’s forests overcrowded and primed for bad burns – an issue that’s less prevalent in the south.
That’s partly why, MacDonald says, the regions have had such different experiences with wildfire. “It’s not like climatologically we have been dodging the bullet – but we just haven’t seen the same impact that we see in the more remote regions of northern California and the Sierra Nevada in those forested systems.”
That doesn’t mean the rest of the state will be spared. A separate study, led by researchers from University of California Irvine, was released last year. The Sierra Nevada temperatures were examinedrange Between 2001 and 2020, there were 450 fires. Their analysis suggests that as the temperatures continue to rise and warming continues, fires could increase in Sierra Nevada by 20% or more over 20 years. The amount of land that is burned will rise even more, increasing by 25% by 2040.
“Wildfires are really sensitive to small changes in temperatures,” says Aurora Gutierrez, a project specialist in UCI’s department of earth system science and lead author of the Sierra Nevada study. The researchers found that for every 1C increase in temperature, the fire risk rises by up to 22%. The region expects temperatures to rise by 2C (3.6F) over the next 20 years.
“When it’s hot for a long time it leads to these megafires that are resistant to fire suppression practices,” Gutierrez says. “In extreme conditions like this, whatever is going to burn is going to burn – and you can’t really do much to stop it.”
Fires are already exhibiting more extreme behavior and pose new challenges to containment efforts.
One new phenomenon, documented in a study published on Wednesday and led by MacDonald’s colleagues at UCLA, is blazes are more likely to burn through the night. The study showed that night fires have increased by 7.2% globally over the past 20 years, due to the persistence of hot, dry conditions after sunset, closing what used to be an important window to control them.
MacDonald views these results as a call for immediate action to decrease emissions. However, he stressed that the models are predictions and not guarantees. There are still many ways to avoid future wildfires that could be even more devastating.
“What we are seeing with the climate system is we are loading the dice,” MacDonald says. “It’s a roll of the dice but we are loading them with more and more days where you have this high probability of a fire and that spark has a greater opportunity to occur when it’s really going to cause damage.”
