28 October 2015, Climate News Network, Rise in wildfires depletes forests’ carbon store. As the world warms, the increasing hazard of forest fires is dangerously tilting trees’ carbon storage balance from positive to negative in some regions of Alaska. In a warming world, forest fires could be about to put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than the trees absorb. New research by US scientists looked at decades of wildfire incidence in Alaska, and they have found that at least one region is now a net exporter of carbon. This is a reversal of the normal arrangements, whereby trees photosynthesise tissue from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As they absorb carbon, they sequester it in roots, timber and leaves, and then in leaf litter in the forest soils. Fire is a natural hazard, and some geographical zones –the Mediterranean, the US southwest, and Australia – are adapted to periodic fire. But as the planet warms, there have been increasing levels of fire even in therainforests of the Amazon and in the boreal forests of the near-Arctic. Read More here
Tag Archives: Bushfire
22 October 2015, Science Daily, Measuring the impacts of severe wildfires in the Arctic. Based on the number of acres burned, 2015 is shaping up to be the second most extreme fire year during the past decade in North America’s boreal region. Historically, the area has had one or fewer extreme fire years per decade. This season, 15 million acres burned in Alaska and Canada, according Northern Arizona University’s Michelle Mack, researcher and biological sciences professor, who is leading a NASA-funded project to measure the severe fire impacts in North America. “In the boreal region, there is a thick organic layer on the surface comprised of litter and soil, that in some cases is hundreds to thousands of years old,” Mack said. “Will more fires and hotter fires burn that layer and release it to the atmosphere and how deep will it burn into the soil?” These questions are part of NASA’s $100 million dollar, 10 year project called Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment, also known as ABoVE. The experiment seeks to understand the vulnerability and resilience in the Arctic, where climate change is most pronounced and rapidly unfolding. Mack serves on the project’s international science team tasked with implementing the field campaign. Read More here
2 September 2015, Washington Post, Wildfires have now burned a massive 8 million acres across the U.S. As of Tuesday, according to the National Interagency Fire Center, more than 8 million acres have burned in U.S. wildfires in 2015. 8,202,557 of them, to be precise. That’s an area larger than the state of Maryland. And the numbers are still growing: 65 large fires are currently raging across the country, particularly in California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana. That includes three Washington state fires or fire complexes that are larger than 100,000 acres burned. As of this writing, the United States remains at wildfire preparedness level 5 — the highest level — where it has been since Aug. 13. There are only six other years that have seen more than 8 million acres burned — 2012, 2011, 2007, 2006, 2005, and 2004 — based on National Interagency Fire Center records that date back to 1960. It is hard not to notice that all of these years came since the year 2000. Read More here
10 August 2015, Washington Post, A stunning five million acres have now burned in Alaskan wildfires this year. Last month, wildfire watchers were astounded as terrifying wildfires raged across the state of Alaska. Sometimes the records would come in with 300,000 or more new acres burned in a single day. It seemed inevitable that the 2015 wildfire season would quickly catch up with and then surpass the all-time record year, 2004, when 6,590,140 acres burned. But then the weather shifted. Rains moved in, and satellite analysts downsized their size estimates of some fires. Instead of racing forward, the fire acreage numbers slowed or even stopped their increase. Only recently have they started to tick back up again. Nonetheless, according to the latest report Tuesday from the Alaska Interagency Coordination Center, Alaska fires have now consumed 5,098,829.9 acres in 2015. That’s about five-sixths of the total acreage consumed by wildfires anywhere in America this year —currently, 6,224,545 acres. It’s also enough to put the 2015 Alaska wildfire season ahead of what was previously the second-place year — 1957, with 5,049,661 acres burned, according to the Alaska Division of Forestry. [Alaska’s terrifying wildfire season and what it says about climate change] So will 2015 overtake 2004 and set a new record for the most acres burned? A seasonal wildfire outlook from the National Interagency Fire Center shows a big red splotch across Alaska for the month of August — a forecast of areas where conditions would be favorable for increased wildfire activity. “The volume of active fires on the landscape should continue to produce acreage gains through August,” the agency notes. As of Tuesday, 238 fires were still burning across the state. Read More here