Due to sequestration, the federal government will be at least $115 million short of normal wildfire fighting capacity during this year’s wildfire season. This is particularly problematic as large portions of the U.S. face a serious drought and extremely dry conditions. As the Washington Post reported, Agriculture Secretary Vilsack said “I hope we can get through this fire season without any fatalities.”

A new report from the House Appropriation committee Democrats found that the Forest service “will have 500 fewer firefighters, 50-70 fewer fire engines, and two fewer aircraft because of sequestration.” Some of the equipment it does still have is outdated — such as the 50-years-old-on-average tanker planes that have crashed multiple times in the last decade, killing 14 people.

A Fox News radio AM talk show expressed incredulity that President Obama and Agriculture Secretary Vilsack “could not find $115 million of fat in the budget so they cut firefighters.” One of the more harmful aspects of sequestration is that the cuts take place “across-the-board” and do not permit the same flexibility in moving funds around within an agency.

Because last year’s wildfire season was so severe, the USDA Forest Service faced a $400 million shortfall for active firefighting and had to borrow money from fire prevention programs to cover the costs. These programs included paying for brush removal from public lands and protecting against invasive plants, disease, insect infestations, and fires. Eventually Congress reimbursed the Forest Service for the shortfall via the 2013 Continuing Resolution but the delays hurt prevention efforts. Last year’s fire season consisted of 67,700 fires burned 9 million acres.

This year, as of May 3, there have been 13,115 wildfires, burning 153,000 acres. Compounding the restraints posed by the inflexible sequester, agencies foresee a $700 million deficit in direct firefighting activities, so similar programs will be de-funded (such as a hazardous-fuels-reduction program to remove long-burning combustible materials from the path of fires).

Congress calculates wildfire suppression funds by averaging the cost over the last ten years. As climate change worsens drought year after year, this calculation becomes deficient. The wildfire season used to range between June and September, but has now expanded to include May and October.

The Western U.S. faces low mountain snowpack, and the most recent U.S. Seasonal Drought Monitor Outlook finds that “drought is forecast to either develop or persist across the western contiguous U.S. as this region enters its dry season.”

Dry conditions in nearly half the country make hampered fire management budgets and sequestration cuts even more dangerous for residents and will lead to even more shortfalls this season. A recent report found that climate change will double the area burned by wildfires by 2050.

Drought and wildfires, in addition to harming people and property, also have dramatic impacts on insects like monarch butterflies, as well as mammals, birds, reptiles, and nearly every plant in the region.

Local communities are trying to face climate adaptation issues alongside the federal government. Texas is preparing for record drought by creating a “rainy day” infrastructure water fund, though none of the legislators acknowledge that climate change is a primary cause of increasing droughts.

A recent report from the General Accounting Office found that the federal government needs to do a better job helping local governments adapt to climate change and integrate climate impacts into infrastructure planning. The report identified roads, bridges, wastewater systems, and federal facilities as particularly vulnerable. Sequestration makes it nearly impossible for the federal government to help local communities adapt to and prepare for climate change-fueled extreme weather and wildfires.

AP photo

A Southern California wildfire that burned through 8,000 acres yesterday has marked an early and ominous start to the state’s fire season.

The fire, fueled by unusually dry conditions and 25 to 60 mph winds that usually aren’t seen until late fall, has damaged 15 homes and forced the evacuation of hundreds of Ventura County residents. As of today, the so-called Springs fire spans more than 15 square miles, with weather forecasts predicting temperatures in the 90s and continuing strong winds.

California has experienced record low rainfall since the “rain year” began in July 2012, with Los Angeles receiving only about five inches of rain since then. Though the winter and early spring months are typically some of Califorina’s wettest, since 2013 began, downtown L.A. has received less than two inches of rain — a fraction of the 11 inches that’s typical for the region at this time of year. The year’s low rainfall coupled with strong Santa Ana winds have created perfect conditions for wildfires in the region, as climatologist William Patzert told the L.A. Times:

It was promising up to December and then all of sudden Mother Nature turned off the spigot,” he said. “It’s remarkable to get Santa Anas in May.… Every way you look at it, it’s been remarkable, unusual and incendiary.

So far, firefighters in California have responded to more than 680 wildfires this year — 200 more the average for this point in the season. In addition to the Springs fire, a wildfire in Riverside County east of L.A. burned through at least 2,950 acres and destroyed two homes before being contained on Thursday, and several fires erupted in Northern California this week as well. The fire risk isn’t expected to let up as the summer goes on — forecasters doubt the Southern California region will receive substantial rain this summer, which has led federal officials to warn of a potentially “devastating” fire season for the state.

And California’s isn’t alone. Multiple studies have linked the risk of stronger, more frequent wildfires to the effects of climate change — most recently, a federal report warned that climate change will double the area of the U.S. burned by wildfires by 2050. Thanks to dry, hot conditions in much of the western U.S., the National Interagency Fire Center predicted this week that fire season could begin early in Oregon and Washington this year as well as in California.

In addition to California’s low rainfall, the state is experiencing decreased snowpack this year, a problem that, as well as exacerbating the state’s dry conditions, spells trouble for California’s freshwater supply. California’s snowpack levels are only at 17 percent of normal readings for this time of year. Water from snowpack usually accounts for up to 75 percent of western California’s freshwater supply and 30 percent of freshwater to the state as a whole.

Source: Environment America

The vast majority of Americans have experienced a weather-related disaster in the past six years, according to a report released today by the Environment America Research and Policy Center.

The report, which is based on disaster declaration data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, found that 243 million Americans — nearly four out of five — have lived in a county that has been hit by at least one federally declared weather-related disaster since 2007. The breadth and impact of these disasters, which include drought, tropical cyclones, flooding, tornadoes, wildfires and snow and ice storms, has been significant. According to the report:

• Every U.S. state besides South Carolina has experienced a weather-related disaster since 2007, and in 18 states and the District of Columbia, weather-related disasters have affected every county.
• More than 19 million Americans live in counties that have averaged one or more weather disaster per year since 2007.
• In 2012 alone, there were at least 11 disasters that caused more than $1 billion in damage, including Hurricane Sandy, which, with a price tag as high as $70 billion, was the costliest weather-related disaster in the U.S. since Hurricane Katrina.
• Eight U.S. counties in South Dakota, Oklahoma and Nebraska have been hit by ten or more weather disasters since the beginning of 2007.

The report notes that the frequency and intensity of several weather-related disasters has increased over the last several years and is predicted to continue increasing as the climate warms. Intense rainfall, for instance, has become more frequent in the U.S., with “the rainiest 1 percent of all storms delivering 20 percent more rain on average at the end of the 20th century than at the beginning,” and this increase is predicted to continue. And it’s likely the record-breaking heat waves, drought and wildfires that have gripped the country in the last few years will also become more common as the planet warms. The link between tornadoes and climate change is more tenuous and complicated (see here).

The report is in line with other studies of its kind — in February, a report from the Center for American Progress found that in 2011 and 2012, 43 states experienced extreme weather events that caused at least $1 billion in damage, and these events caused 1,107 fatalities and up to $188 billion in damage in total. To slow the increase of many kinds of extreme weather events, the Environment America report calls on federal and state governments to implement caps on greenhouse gases — especially on high-emitting sources, such as power plants and the transportation sector — and adopt goals of reducing emissions by at least 35 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and at least 85 percent by 2050.

Wildfires in the U.S. will be at least twice as destructive by 2050, burning around 20 million acres nationwide each year, according to a federal report released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Scientists from the U.S. Forest Service, who authored the report, found regions such as western Colorado — which already experienced its most destructive wildfire in history last summer — will face an even greater risk fire risk: those regions are expected to face up to a five-fold increase in acres burned by 2050.

The report’s findings are in line with previous studies on climate change’s relation to fire risk: a 2012 study found that wildfire burn season is two and a half months longer than it was 40 years ago, and that for every one degree Celsius temperature increase the earth experiences, the area burned in the western U.S. could quadruple. The findings are also in line with the observed impacts climate change is having on wildfires. Wildfires in 2012 burned a record 9.2 million acres in the U.S., and record-breaking heat and dry weather in Australia provided ideal conditions for at least 90 fires that raged through the country this January.

The report also outlines the other effects climate change will have on the forests of the U.S. The Rocky Mountain forests are expected to become hotter and drier as the planet warms, conditions that in addition to wildfires will lead to an increase in infestations of insects such as the bark beetle, which has already destroyed tens of millions of acres of U.S. forests. One species, the mountain pine beetle, has already killed 70,000 square miles of trees — area the size of Washington state. As winters become milder, weather becomes drier and higher elevations become warmer, bark beetles are able to thrive and extend their ranges northward. An increase in some species of bark beetle can actually increase the risk of forest fires in areas affected by the beetle — the study notes an outbreak of the mountain pine bark beetle, which attacks and kills live trees, created a “perfect storm” in 2006 in Washington, where affected lodgepole pines burned “with exceptionally high intensity.”

David Peterson, a U.S. Forest Service biologist who co-authored the report, told the Denver Post that the destruction the bark beetles have inflicted upon western forests in recent years has been unprecedented:

“We’re getting into extreme events that seem to be having more and more effects across broader landscapes.”

The report also predicts an increase of invasive plants and animals, as well as flooding and erosion due to increased rainfall, higher rain to snow ratios and more burned areas. It notes that U.S. forests offset 13 percent of the country’s carbon emissions, and as trees killed by insects and fire decompose, they’ll emit carbon themselves. Because of the sweeping impacts, the report, which is being finalized for the White House and Congress, calls on forest managers to make “climate-smart” practices, such as thinning fire-vulnerable forests, a priority.

A new report confirms that the extreme heat waves, floods, droughts and wildfires that have wracked Australia over the past decade have been exacerbated by climate change. The report, commissioned by the Australian government’s Climate Commission, makes clear that these weather events will only get worse in the coming years, and warns that health and emergency professionals as well as citizens must prepare for their impacts now.

The study’s chief commissioner Tim Flannery said the study’s results mean Australia needs to take action to slow climate change.

FLANNERY: Records are broken from time to time, but record-breaking weather is becoming more common as the climate shifts. Only strong preventative action, with deep and swift cuts in emissions this decade, can stabilize the climate and halt the trend towards more intense extreme weather.

The study examines five impacts of climate change that have already begun to affect Australia:

• Heat: Australia broke 123 weather records in 90 days this summer. In January, Sydney hit a record 114 degrees, and the south Australian town of Moomba hit 121.3 degrees. The report notes that in Australia, there has been more than three times the number of record hot days than record cold days in the past 10 years. The heat has majorly impacted the country: in 2009, a heatwave led to 980 heat-related deaths, which is three times the average mortality rate for heatwaves, and heat has contributed to bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef.
• Rainfall: Extreme rainfall in Queensland in 2010 and 2011 led to record-breaking and damaging floods, which broke river height records at more than 100 observation stations. As temperature increases, the report found that the likelihood of torrential rainfall events will increase as well in some areas — a finding consistent with climate change predictions.
• Drought: Australia emerged from a decade-long drought in 2009, which was said to be the worst in the country’s history. The report states the drought was estimated to have caused an 80 percent reduction in grain production and a 40 percent reduction in livestock production, and climate models predict that rainfall in southern and eastern Australia will continue to decrease as the century progresses.
• Bushfires: Australia has seen an increase in fire weather (hot, dry, windy days) over the last 30 years, and the fire season in southeast Australia has extended into November and March. The Black Saturday fires of 2009 killed 173 people and cost about A$4.4 billion. As the duration of hot, dry days is likely to increase in much of Australia, wildfire risk is also predicted to go up.
• Sea level rise: Climate change has already contributed to a 21 centimeter rise in global sea levels, the report states, and  major flooding in 2005, 2006, 2009 and 2010 in Australia’s Torres Strait Islands were likely made more damaging by the increases in sea level.

The study confirms what climate scientists have warned for years — that climate change will likely lead to an increase in extreme weather events. It comes at a time when the effects of climate change are being felt not just in Australia, but around the world: Drastic melting of Arctic sea ice has been linked to a bitterly cold Spring in parts of Europe and North America that has devastated sheep farmers, and the record-breaking drought that affected more than half of the continental U.S. in 2012 is expected to continue into this spring and summer.

The Australian government’s Climate Commission — an independent panel of experts set up by the government but not subject to its direction or oversight — issued a new report on Monday labeling Australia’s latest summer season the “Angry Summer” in honor of the rash of brush fires, heat waves, torrential rains and flooding that pounded the country.

“Australia has always been… a land of extremes,” the report said, but global warming of 0.8 degrees Celsius over the last 100 years and the resulting climate change is now driving the extreme weather to new heights. “All extreme weather events are now occurring in a climate system that is warmer and moister than it was 50 years ago,” the report warned. “The basic features of the climate system have now shifted and are continuing to shift.”

At least 123 weather records were broken during the 90-day time frame examined by the report, including the hottest summer since record-keeping began in 1910, the hottest day for Australia as a whole ever recorded, and the hottest seven consecutive days ever recorded. The commission ran through the severity and influencing factors of each form of extreme weather Australia has seen:

• Record-Breaking Heat: Australia has only seen 21 days in 102 years in which the average maximum temperature for the whole country exceeded 39 degrees Celsius, and eight of them hit this summer. On top of that, the record-breaking heat occurred in the absence of an El Niño — the 12 to 18-month periods of warm, dry conditions that cyclically roll through — which usually has accompanied Australia’s previous hottest summers. Even the small shift in Australia’s average temperature of 0.9 degrees Celsius that’s occurred since 1910 can have profound effects on the severity and frequency of hot weather, as it alters the distribution of extreme weather’s likelihood.
• Brush fires: As many as 40 brush fires tore through Tasmania this summer, destroying around 25,000 hectares of land, 200 properties, and 21 businesses. Other rashes of fires hit New South Wales and Victoria. Climate change can leave soil and plant life drier while extending the life of the fire season. In fact, the Forest Fire Danger Index, the numerical gauge used to assess the threat of brush fires, had to be extended on the high end in 2009 due to the increase in extreme weather.
• Heavy rain and flooding: Unusually heavy rains triggered severe flooding in areas of New South Wales and Queensland this summer, breaking many daily rainfall records throughout the area. The most impressive was the one-day rainfall averaged over the Burnett catchment, which beat out the previous record by almost 70 percent. By raising ocean and air temperatures, climate change increases evaporation and moisture content in the air, resulting in heavier individual rainfalls even as overall precipitation goes down in many areas.

Other extreme weather events Australia dealt with this past summer include tornadoes that touched in Bundaberg and other Queensland townships, as well as two tropical cyclones that hit the north and northwestern coasts of the country.
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A “dome of heat,” has settled over Australia since the start of the new year, creating an historic heat wave. The temperatures have nurtured fires in five of Australia’s six states, including at least 90 wildfires throughout New South Wales in southeastern Australia, as well as the Island of Tasmania. In the latter case, the fires consumed over 100 homes and other buildings, 60,000 hectares of land (approximately 148,000 acres) and left up to 100 people unaccounted for as of January 6.

“We saw tornadoes of fire just coming across towards us,” one Tasmanian survivor said. “The next thing we knew everything was on fire, everywhere, all around us.” Another local resident said that “the trees just exploded” as he tried to help fire crews in the township of Murdunna, which was mostly destroyed by the blaze.

The heat wave is also setting new records: On Monday the national average temperature hit 40.33 degrees Centigrade (104.6 degrees Fahrenheit), topping the previous December 21, 1976 record 40.17 degrees Centigrade.

“It’s been a summer like no other in the history of Australia, where a sprawling heat wave of historical proportions is entering its second week,” wrote Jeff Masters of the Weather Underground today.

The Bureau of Meteorology even added new colors to its weather forecasting chart to account for the record heat levels. And by the end of Tuesday, by all accounts, seven of Australia’s 20 hottest days on record will have been set in 2013. As the New Scientist summed up matters yesterday:

Temperatures reached almost 48 °C on Monday at the Oodnadatta airport in South Australia, and 43 °C on Tuesday in Sydney. The typical January high is 37.7 °C at Oodnadatta. [...]

At least 90 fires were sweeping through New South Wales by Monday, and 100 people remained unaccounted for in Tasmania following major fires covering 60,000 hectares. Bushfire experts warned that things could get worse. “The current heatwave is unusual due to its extent, with more than 70 per cent of the continent currently experiencing heatwave conditions,” says John Nairn, South Australia’s acting regional director for the Bureau of Meteorology, in comments to the Australian Science Media Centre.

Lack of rainfall in recent months has left soils completely dry and unable to release moisture that would take up heat from the air through evaporation. At the same time, vegetation across the continent that had been revived by rains over the past two years is now completely dried out. “Much of this grass is fully dried and is ready to burn,” says Gary Morgan of the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre in Melbourne.

The severe fire conditions are expected to continue today. “Any fire that burns under the predicted conditions — 40C temperatures, below 10% humidity, winds gusting over 70km/hr (43mph) – those conditions are by any measure horrendous,” Rob Rogers, the deputy commissioner of the New South Wales rural fire service, told The Guardian.

In 2009, another flurry of wildfires hit the Australian state of Victoria, killing 173 people and causing $4.4 billion in damage. That same year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published predictions that days of extreme fire danger for southeastern Australia would increase 25 percent by 2020, and perhaps as much 70 percent by 2050.

Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard also took up the theme in reaction to the fires: “You would not put any one event down to climate change,” she said, but “we do know over time that as a result of climate change we are going to see more extreme weather events and conditions.”

Here in America, a 2009 report noted a significant uptick in the scale of wildfires, starting around the mid-1990s. Global warming is combining increasing drought conditions with higher temperatures, while also causing warmer winters that reduce snowpack in areas like Arizona and Colorado. At the same time, human development is pushing more people into forested regions, thus increasing the risk of damage. Not surprisingly, local and national officials have noted all these concerns as areas where policy has yet to catch up with reality.

This research brief was originally published at NASA.

Scientists using NASA satellite data and climate models have projected drier conditions likely will cause increased fire activity across the United States in coming decades. Other findings about U.S. wildfires, including their amount of carbon emissions and how the length and strength of fire seasons are expected to change under future climate conditions, were also presented Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Doug Morton of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., presented the new analysis of future U.S. fire activity. The analysis was based on current fire trends and predicted greenhouse gas emissions.

“Climate models project an increase in fire risk across the U.S. by 2050, based on a trend toward drier conditions that favor fire activity and an increase in the frequency of extreme events,” Morton said.

The analysis by Morton and colleagues used climate projections, prepared for the Fifth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to examine how dryness, and therefore fire activity, is expected to change.

The researchers calculated results for low and high greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. In both cases, results suggest more fire seasons that are longer and stronger across all regions of the U.S. in the next 30-50 years. Specifically, high fire years like 2012 would likely occur two to four times per decade by mid-century, instead of once per decade under current climate conditions.

Through August of this year, the U.S. burned area topped 2.5 million hectares (6.17 million acres), according to a fire emissions database that incorporates burned area estimates produced from observations by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer instruments on NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites. That is short of the record 3.2 million hectares (7.90 million acres) burned in 2011, but exceeds the area burned during 12 of the 15 years since record keeping began in 1997. This and other satellite records, along with more refined climate and emissions models, are allowing scientists to tease out new information about fire trends.

“Fire is an inherently global phenomenon, and the only practical way to track large-scale patterns and changes in fire activity is with satellites,” says Louis Giglio of the University of Maryland at College Park and Goddard.

As the U.S. land area burned by fire each year has increased significantly in the past 25 years, so too have the emissions. Carbon dioxide emissions from wildfires in the western U.S. have more than doubled since the 1980s, according to Chris Williams of Clark University in Worcester, Mass.

The satellite-based view allowed Williams and his colleagues to quantify how much carbon has been released from fires in the U.S. West. The team used data on fire extent and severity derived from Landsat satellites to calculate how much biomass is burned and killed, and how quickly the associated carbon was released to the atmosphere. The team found carbon emissions from fires have grown from an average of 8 teragrams (8.8 million tons) per year from 1984 to 1995 to an average of 20 teragrams (22 million tons) per year from 1996 to 2008, increasing 2.4 times in the latter period.

“With the climate change forecast for the region, this trend likely will continue as the western U.S. gets warmer and drier on average,” Williams said. “If this comes to pass, we can anticipate increased fire severity and an even greater area burned annually, causing a further rise in the release of carbon dioxide.”

Researchers expect a drier and more wildfire-prone U.S. in future decades. Previous research confirmed the connection between the measure of an environment’s potential evaporation, or dryness, and fire activity.

From a fire and emissions management perspective, wildfires are not the entire U.S. fire story, according to research by Hsiao-Wen Lin of the University of California at Irvine. Satellite data show agricultural and prescribed fires are a significant factor and account for 70 percent of the total number of active fires in the continental U.S. Agricultural fires have increased 30 percent in the last decade.

In contrast with wildfires, agricultural and prescribed fires are less affected by climate, especially drought, during the fire season.

“That means there is greater potential to manage fire emissions, even in a future, drier climate with more wildfires. We need to use cost-benefit analysis to assess whether reductions in agricultural fire emissions — which would benefit public health — would significantly impact crop yields or other ecosystem services,” Lin said.

by Richard Sommerville and Jeff Masters, via Climate Communication

With oppressive heat waves, devastating droughts, ravaging wildfires, and hard-hitting rainstorms, the summer of 2012 has been one for the record books. Thousands of precipitation and temperature records were broken, plaguing almost all of the contiguous United States this season and underscoring the connection between climate change and increasingly frequent and intense extreme weather. With climate change, we’ve set the stage for precisely this kind of extreme weather, and unfortunately, our changing climate threatens to alter summers to come.

It is important to note that as the planet continues to warm, new high temperature records and some other types of extremes will increasingly occur, but where they occur in a given year will not be predictable due to natural modes of climate variability. Extreme weather pummeled the United States this summer, but the next few years might see the most dramatic extremes occurring elsewhere around the world. Regardless, record-breaking high temperatures, droughts, wildfires, and heavy downpours are all signs of new extreme weather patterns that we can expect to see more of in a warming world, both domestically and abroad.

Here’s a roundup of weather events during the record-breaking summer of 2012:

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