Climate crisis will increase frequency of lightning-sparked wildfires, study finds | US wildfires

The climate crisis will continue to make forest fires that show lightning more frequently for decades, which can produce step -up effects and deteriorate public safety and public health, and recommend experts and new research.

Lightning -induced fires tend to burn in more remote areas, and therefore usually turn into larger fires than human -induced fires. This means that a tendency towards fires caused by more lightning is probably more fatal by producing more forest fire smoke and an increase in air quality problems from shore to shore. Especially in the last few years.

In the last 40 years, lightning and other weather conditions lightning it happens more often Western Washington, West Oregon, California Central Valley and Rocky Mountains, including higher altitudes along the mountains of the United States in many parts of the West.

This trend is not only in the USA. This year’s fire season was partly the worst in European history. Lightning Forest Fires in Spain. In Canada, large fires this year burned more than 200% of the normal forest area caused by lightning.

Despite the well -documented tendency for malicious fires, most of the climate models have been rude to solve how the relationship between lightning and forest fires will change as the climate crisis deepens.

A New work The first week was published in the first week, which uses machine learning techniques to cope with this problem last week, and at the same time looking at the changes in future changes in lightning frequency and changes in air variables such as air temperature, humidity, wind and soil moisture.

Dmitri Kalashnikov, the Chief of Research Institute of Sierra Nevada of California-Merced, and the chief writer of the study, said, iz We will have the risk of general signal, lightning-based fires, ”he said.

The findings are shifting to the high gear in the United States this year’s forest fire season, like what Kalashnikov dreamed for the future – it is moving forward after a series of dry storms from California in the beginning of this week.

Thousands of lightning strikes This week, he made at least 20 new fires and burned tens of thousands of acres in the central valley of California and on the skirts of Sierra Nevada, and a fire destroyed several structures in the golden rush period of the Chinese camp in the east of Modesto.

Kalashnikov’s team found that some places such as the inner Pacific North-West would see a relatively small increase in the risk of general fire due to the moisturizing environment. Other places such as Desert South-West will see an increase in the risk of forest fire without a change in the number of days in lightning due to a general trend for more common drought.

Despite these regional differences, the result was clear: almost everyone will be interested in the risk of more forest fire in the future. In fact, Kalashnikov’s team, in a solid 98% of the Western United States, “more lightning or more fire air or both lightning due to lightning has found future increases.

In a future world with limited fire extinguishing sources, the effects of more lightning -based forest fires are worried.

For the last 15 years, the forest fire smoke killed about a thousand people in the United States every year. An increase in lightning -induced fires may cause America’s smoke epidemic to take potentially life More than 20,000 people per year in the middle of the century.

In addition to the increase in the risk of forest fire, Kalashnikov’s work has the biggest impact of the expected increase in storm and lightning in some parts of the West, especially in recent areas of flash floods and mud shifts. It can cover the glaciers in smoke, Canada, Greenland and Europe with dark particles. This can melt them faster.

Due to their distant nature, lightning -based forest fires tend to remove the emergency intervention capacity from urban areas.

Even today, California University Cooperative Extension Forest Fire Specialist and Assistant Professor Max Moritz in California University-Santa Barbara, a sudden lightning storm “resources really, really weaken,” he said.

“Maybe a week or two later, you may have a big Santa main wind activity, Mor Moritz said,“ Then you have a real recipe for disaster. ”

When combined with the tendency of urbanization of the forest -fired areas that we see throughout the West, a world with worse fires can only impose additional pressure on the insurance industry that digested billions of dollars of claims from this year’s fires in Los Angeles.

Fire extinguishing sources in the United States, the interruptions of the Trump administration at the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration, the National Park Service and the West personnel and a number of other federal agencies are finely stretched throughout the country. As of the end of July, more than one quarter of all firefighters remained empty at the US Forest Service and a recent migrant raid for an active fire brigade in Oregon It has been reported that the fireman reduced morale.

Moritz sees a possible partial solution-change our way to establish a city in prone areas.

In addition to establishing basic fire safety building codes, Moritz foresees agricultural tampons surrounding cities that can effectively protect houses.

Moritz, “Currently, live fuel moisture, green life branches and leaves of water in the amount of fire dynamics is a really strong control of the raise awareness,” he said. “What we have in Santa Barbara here. We have an existing old agricultural belt that is relatively thin. In still existing places, fires cannot sweep from national forest and neighborhoods.”