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Quantifying increased fire risk in California in response to different levels of warming and drying

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Abstract

Warming temperatures and severe droughts have contributed to increasing fire activity in California. Decadal average summer temperature in California has increased by 0.8 °C during 1984–2014, while the decadal total size of large fires has expanded by a factor of 2.5. This study proposes a multivariate probabilistic approach for quantifying changes to fire risk given different climatic conditions. Our results indicate that the risk of large fires in California increases substantially in response to unit degree changes in summer temperature. The probability of annual mean fire size exceeding its long-term average increases by 30% when summer temperature anomaly increases by 1 °C (from −0.5 °C to + 0.5 °C). Furthermore, the probability of annual average fire size exceeding its long-term average doubles when the annual precipitation decreases from the 75th (wet) to the 25th (dry) percentile. The proposed model can help manage fire-prone regions where fire activity is expected to intensify under projected global warming.

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Acknowledgement

This study is partially supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) award NA19OAR4310294 and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) award NA14OAR4310222. We appreciate the data and review comments provided by Todd Sanford, Alyson Kenward and James Bronzan from Climate Central. Fire data is obtained from Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity Project (MTBS.gov), and monthly temperature and precipitation from the CRU TS v3.23 gridded climate dataset (https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/hrg/).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of of Civil & Environmental Engineering, Department of Earth System Sciences, E/4130 Engineering Gateway, University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA, 92697, USA

    Shahrbanou Madadgar, Felicia Chiang, Elisa Ragno & Amir AghaKouchak

  2. Boise State University, ERB 4147, Boise, ID, 83725-2060, USA

    Mojtaba Sadegh

  3. Department of Hydraulic Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Stevinweg 1, 2628CN, Delft, The Netherlands

    Elisa Ragno

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  1. Shahrbanou Madadgar
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  2. Mojtaba Sadegh
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  3. Felicia Chiang
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  4. Elisa Ragno
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  5. Amir AghaKouchak
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Contributions

AA and SM conceived the study. SM and MS developed the code. SM led the data analysis with inputs from AA and ER. SM, AA and FC prepared the first draft. All authors reviewed the paper and contributed to the discussions.

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Correspondence to Amir AghaKouchak.

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Madadgar, S., Sadegh, M., Chiang, F. et al. Quantifying increased fire risk in California in response to different levels of warming and drying. Stoch Environ Res Risk Assess 34, 2023–2031 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00477-020-01885-y

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