Margaret Torn, Earth Sciences Division
Evan Mills, Environmental Energy Technologies Division
Jeremy Fried, Dept. of Forestry, Michigan State University
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
1 Cyclotron Rd.
Berkeley, CA 94720
1999
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This report describes a geographically specific estimate of the potential effect of climate change on wildfires and the effectiveness of fire-fighting infrastructure in California, the first study of its kind. The analysis was accomplished thanks to an innovative coupling of California Department of Forestry wildfire models with the Goddard Institute for Space Sciences global climate model. The regions studied contain substantial areas of wildland/urban interface conditions on the margins of the San Francisco Bay area, the Sacramento metropolitan area, and the Redwood region's urban center of Eureka.
Global warming may increase the risk of wildfires by warming and drying out vegetation, and by stirring the winds that spread fires. As indicated by the models, in most cases climate change would lead to dramatic increases in both the land area burned by California wildfires and the number of potentially catastrophic fires--more than doubling these losses in some regions. Several important climate-wildfire interactions not currently captured by these models would amplify the expected growth in wildfires. The growth in wildfire damages would occur despite deployment of fire suppression resources at the hightest current level, suggesting that climactic change could cause an increase in both fire suppression costs and economic losses due to wildfires.
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LBNL Report No. LBNL-42592 (November 1998) can be downloaded here.