{"id":24295,"date":"2012-09-18T15:30:43","date_gmt":"2012-09-18T22:30:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kqed.org\/climatewatch\/?p=24295"},"modified":"2018-02-01T22:18:32","modified_gmt":"2018-02-01T22:18:32","slug":"the-new-age-of-western-wildfires-may-be-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ww2.kqed.org\/climatewatch\/2012\/09\/18\/the-new-age-of-western-wildfires-may-be-here\/","title":{"rendered":"The New Age of Western Wildfires May Be Here"},"content":{"rendered":"

A review of national fire data <\/em>suggests that the “typical” wildfire season may need redefining
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

This post is based on a report produced by <\/em>Climate Central<\/a>, a non-profit climate education group<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Screenshot from Climate Central's Interactive Wildfire Tracker. Click on the image to see where wildfires are currently burning.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The 2012 wildfire season isn\u2019t over yet, but already this year is shaping up to be the one of the worst on record\u00a0in the American West. According to the National Interagency Fire Center<\/a>, with nearly two months still to go in the\u00a0fire season, the total area already burned this year is 30% more than in an average year, and fires have\u00a0consumed more than 8.6 million acres, an area larger than the state of Maryland.<\/p>\n

Yet, what defines a \u201ctypical\u201d wildfire year in the West is changing. In the past 40 years, rising spring and summer temperatures, along with a shrinking mountain snowpack, have increased the risk of wildfires in most parts of the West.<\/p>\n

Studies show that continued climate change is going to make wildfires much more common in the coming decades.<\/p>\n

The National Research Council reports that for every degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of temperature increase, the size of the area burned in the Western U.S. could quadruple. According to the 4th<\/sup>Assessment Report from the U.N.’s climate science panel, summer temperatures in western North America could increase between 3.6 degrees and 9 degrees by the middle of this century.<\/p>\n

Key findings<\/strong><\/p>\n

Climate Central’s analysis<\/a> [PDF] of 42 years of U.S. Forest Service records for 11 Western states shows that:<\/p>\n

The number of large and very large fires on Forest Service land is increasing dramatically.\u00a0 Compared to the average year in the 1970\u2019s, the past decade saw:<\/p>\n