Dataset Information

Global patterns of interannual climate-fire relationships.

ABSTRACT: Climate shapes geographic and seasonal patterns in global fire activity by mediating vegetation composition, productivity, and desiccation in conjunction with land-use and anthropogenic factors. Yet, the degree to which climate variability affects interannual variability in burned area across Earth is less understood. Two decades of satellite-derived burned area records across forested and nonforested areas were used to examine global interannual climate-fire relationships at ecoregion scales. Measures of fuel aridity exhibited strong positive correlations with forested burned area, with weaker relationships in climatologically drier regions. By contrast, cumulative precipitation antecedent to the fire season exhibited positive correlations to nonforested burned area, with stronger relationships in climatologically drier regions. Climate variability explained roughly one-third of the interannual variability in burned area across global ecoregions. These results highlight the importance of climate variability in enabling fire activity globally, but also identify regions where anthropogenic and other influences may facilitate weaker relationships. Empirical fire modeling efforts can complement process-based global fire models to elucidate how fire activity is likely to change amidst complex interactions among climatic, vegetation, and human factors.

SUBMITTER: Abatzoglou JT

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7134822 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Global patterns of interannual climate-fire relationships.

Abatzoglou John T JT Williams A Park AP Boschetti Luigi L Zubkova Maria M Kolden Crystal A CA

Global change biology 20180824 11

Climate shapes geographic and seasonal patterns in global fire activity by mediating vegetation composition, productivity, and desiccation in conjunction with land-use and anthropogenic factors. Yet, the degree to which climate variability affects interannual variability in burned area across Earth is less understood. Two decades of satellite-derived burned area records across forested and nonforested areas were used to examine global interannual climate-fire relationships at ecoregion scales. M ...[more]

PMID: 30047195

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Project description:In the face of recent wildfires across the Western United States, it is essential that we understand both the dynamics that drive the spatial distribution of wildfire, and the major obstacles to modeling the probability of wildfire over space and time. However, it is well documented that the precise relationships of local vegetation, climate, and ignitions, and how they influence fire dynamics, may vary over space and among local climate, vegetation, and land use regimes. This raises questions not only as to the nature of the potentially nonlinear relationships between local conditions and the fire, but also the possibility that the scale at which such models are developed may be critical to their predictive power and to the apparent relationship of local conditions to wildfire. In this study we demonstrate that both local climate-through limitations posed by fuel dryness (CWD) and availability (AET)-and human activity-through housing density, roads, electrical infrastructure, and agriculture, play important roles in determining the annual probabilities of fire throughout California. We also document the importance of previous burn events as potential barriers to fire in some environments, until enough time has passed for vegetation to regenerate sufficiently to sustain subsequent wildfires. We also demonstrate that long-term and short-term climate variations exhibit different effects on annual fire probability, with short-term climate variations primarily impacting fire probability during periods of extreme climate anomaly. Further, we show that, when using nonlinear modeling techniques, broad-scale fire probability models can outperform localized models at predicting annual fire probability. Finally, this study represents a powerful tool for mapping local fire probability across the state of California under a variety of historical climate regimes, which is essential to avoided emissions modeling, carbon accounting, and hazard severity mapping for the application of fire-resistant building codes across the state of California.

Dataset Information

Global patterns of interannual climate-fire relationships.

Publications

Global patterns of interannual climate-fire relationships.

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