Last summer was the hottest in US history. It was terrible, a loathsome furnace that’s made for the best feeling fall ever. Thank g-d it’s over. Also just about over is forest fire season, which is great news for those of us living in old wooden structures in arid, wooded environments. Colorado had its worst fire season in recent memory this year too, and it seems easy enough to draw a connection between the two, though the fires had more to do with low precipitation levels in the spring and warm winter nights than heat wave brutality. But, a new study out from the University of Barcelona suggests that there’s a definite statistical link between climate conditions — including both temperature and rainfall — and forest fires. The catch is that there’s a two year lag.The study, out in the current issue of Climactic Change, looked at 16,753 fires over a 25 year period in Catalonia, burning roughly 240,000 hectares or around 7.5 percent of the entire region. Applying some methods of statistical analysis to the data set, researchers were able to come up with a fairly neat pair of models. One links the minimum temperature over the February – June period of a given year to the number of fires two years later, and the other links total area burned in a given year with the maximum temperature of the March – April period two years prior.“Even if it is not confirmed yet, this relation with climate data of two previous years has to do with the vegetation cycle of the region studied,” says UB researcher Maria del Carme Llasat. The overall idea is that climate conditions govern the wider system of specific fire factors (vegetation, say), which work in a super-complex way to support (or frustrate) fire activity. (Fire mismanagement also has a lot to do with it.) The study’s results might be a bit, well, duh (higher temperatures, low rainfall equals fire), but having actual models in these here days of global warming are crucial to being able to plan for the disasters of the near future.We might not be able to head those disasters off by fixing our climate situation — or, rather, we don’t want to — but at least we can do things to make the hellish forest fires of 2014 not quite the catastrophe they would be otherwise, just by expecting them. Whether or not we will is another thing.
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