Now I would like to welcome
Hajo Eicken the director of the International
Arctic Research Center to introduce our speaker.
Welcome everybody to an early
start of the fire season.
It's a pleasure.
To see this many folks out here.
It's a pleasure for me to introduce Randi
Jandt.
Randi works at the International Arctic Research
Center.
She does a whole bunch of things and you'll
learn more about what she's doing.
Her background is in wildlife studies.
She got a master's here at UAF.
Has been working in that arena for about 30
years as a wildlife ecologist a fire ecologist
at times a fire fighter.
So I'm looking forward to learning more about
that aspect of her job and now she's working
part time at the International Arctic Research
Center as part of the Alaska Fire Science
Consortium.
So Alaska Fire Science Consortium you'll hear
a bit more about it in Randi's talk I think
but I do want to point you to this nice little
bookmark here.
It's interesting construct and it's successful
because of people like Randi.
Randi brings together expertise from the fire
management community.
She's a former fire manager to some extent
as well.
She creates links between different groups
of experts who are tasked with dealing with
wildfire hazards, wildfire management response
and what's make- what makes this interesting
from the perspective of the universe is that
we're serving as the host of these types of
conversations where fire managers from different
agencies and communities can get access to
the best that cutting edge research has to
offer in terms of what are some new approaches
to deal with some of these fire hazards.
And it's because of people like Randy that
this actually works.
I would like to highlight Alison York here
who's the coordinator for the Alaska Fire
Science Consortium.
If you have questions about various aspects
of Randy's work or the Alaska Fire Science
Consortium, Alison will be able to help you
as well and some of this is relevant at the
community level.
I know Randy is interested in looking at how
effective are different types of firebreaks.
You know what can you do at the community
or even local homeowner or a property owner
level.
And those are also the types of questions
that AFSC is dealing with.
But now we're going to get to the cutting
edge of fire science and fire research and
Randy is going to share with us, her answers
to the question of whether defrosting the
ice box is going to give us more summer wildfires.
Thanks Randi.
Randi Jandt: Thank you very much Hajo.
Appreciate that.
The Alaska Fire Science Consortium although
we are housed at the university might be interested
to know that our funding actually comes from
all the agencies who manage wildfire.
So department of interior, Bureau of land
management, Alaska Fire Service, Forest Service-
that's who funds us because we are to bring
them together with cutting edge research and
focus the talent that the university has and
research groups all over the country on practical.
Fire questions that they need to know now.
So that's our mission in a nutshell.
So without further ado.
Let's see if I can make this thing work.
There we go.
How's the volume.
Can you hear me there in the back does it
sound ok- too loud?
No.
OK good.
OK so some of you might be thinking this is
kind of a dumb question.
If it's getting warmer then, yeah there'll
probably be more fires.
But I'd like to take us under the hood tonight
and look at some of the interactions between
not only climate and fire regime but also
some of the other environmental factors that
have a strong influence on what will really
happen with fires in the future.
And I will be relying on the research of a
veritable village of scientists and in a few
of my own studies to do this.
So what's the ice box.
Well I'm sure you've figured out that's Alaska
and it's a pretty big ice box, did that you
know that it's 18 percent of the United States
landmass in the icebox.
And depending on who you talk to stores between
a third and a half of the organic carbon in
the United States.
So it's significant, it also turns out that
it's a really good laboratory to study the
effect of climate on wildfire regime as opposed
to management practices and things because
of our relative lack of things like logging.
Once you get off the major river corridors
and our relatively short history of fire suppression
in the state.
So this is a really interesting area to look
at.
And of course we're warming twice as fast
as the lower 48 we've warmed about 4 degrees
since 1950.
As this graph shows in the state as just annual
average temperature and interestingly enough
did you realize this that five of the 10 warmest
years on record have been in the last decade,
you realize that?
So it is warming quickly and I would like
to first look at the big picture and some
of the environmental impacts that are a result
of this warming and then so we don't think
about the fire regime in isolation but as
part of this larger picture.
So if you attended Dr. Martin Steufer's lecture
'Some Like It Hot' then you might have seen
this graph on Arctic sea ice extent which
is shrinking by about 4 percent per decade
on average or if you just think about the
minimum sea ice extent in the fall which is
usually in September it's down 40 percent
in the satellite era which is quite a contraction.
And it's also becoming thinner but the extent
the area, surface area of that ice is is the
most important thing too that influences radiative
forcing and inducing both regional warming
effects and feedbacks to global warming.
Sea ice extent as it turns out is one of the
big factors in this phenomenon called Arctic
amplification whereby as the Earth warms a
lot of that warming is happening faster up
in our neck of the woods as you can see on
this diagram showing about a decade of temperature
anomalies and lots of red up in the northern
hemisphere and some of that is due to sea
ice contraction and also it's giving us maybe
just a little more rainfall.
It's also happening with terrestrial ice so
in this graph from the Fourth National Climate
Assessment that just came out this fall the
Alaska glacier mass as shown indicated by
the star's declining rapidly especially since
about 1990s and even more remarkably this
is happening with underground ice.
So this.
Perma quote Frost- No this is really our legacy
from the ice ages, very little of this kind
of ice was formed in the last 10000 years
in the Holocene most of this is old ice and
it occurs in various concentrations in the
soil.
Some places are almost pure ice wedges like
this and other places just have a high ice
content.
So the remarkable thing is how quickly this
is warming all across the state.
And maybe you heard this- the Kenai Peninsula
they just realized the Kenai Peninsula lost
60- has lost almost half of its permafrost
in the last 60 years.
That is very rapid change.
So the projections for the balance of the
century are that by the end of this century
Alaska could lose as much as 25 percent of
its permafrost.
And obviously here in the interior we'll have
a front seat for this it has big implications
for infrastructure but it also has big implications
for forests and for wildfire.
The melting of that ice globally could release
about one point five billion tons of CO2 to
the atmosphere and to put that in comparison
that's about the same as the annual release
of CO2 from all fossil fuels burning in the
United States.
So that is a significant amount.
It's probably already occurred to you that
there could be sort of a vicious cycle set
up here by where more greenhouse gases may
lead to more heating and and more melting
and more fires.
The point I'd like to make that with this
ice driven deeper or disappearing in the ground
the this Moss duff that underlies our forests
here in the fourth floor can dry out more
quickly and is more susceptible to ignite
and burn.
So here is that's exactly what Jim Reardon
is getting ready to do here down at the Missoula
fire lab a few years back he's going to experimentally
burn in Alaska duff-plug we call this, to
see how the moisture content affects the burning.
And so this duff plug this is very recognizable
toward the surface as Moss and then it gets
a little more decomposed down here.
But Moss decomposes really slowly up here
in our climate and then at the bottom you
get down into mineral soil which would be
rock silt dirt whatever you want to call it-
gravel.
So.
Also out that Moss layer is an important insulator
of the permafrost.
Each centimeter of thickness here can reduce
the subsurface temperature by almost a degree.
So it's also got a important function to insulate.
And so these dry moss layers could also not
only that not only did they ignite more easily
but they could also burn deeper during a wildfire.
What would that look like.
Here's a typical low severity burn scar.
I know this because most of the moss layer
is still there, the roots of these trees are
primarily rooted into that moss layer and
if the moss layer would have burned deeply
then like it did around this White Spruce
where it was just dried down deeper to mineral
soil here and it burned away all the roots
of this tree and this tree is going down with
the first puff of wind and all the other plants
that were rooted around here are gone as well.
So how about this one.
This looks kind of bad.
At first sight.
This was the aftermath of a 2004 fire up on
the Steese highway out by Central and it was
a muskeg-y low lying black spruce area with
a lot of tussocks and shrubs like Labrador
tea and blueberry when the fire burned.
So.
It looks bad.
But the thing is it was so low lying that
had a lot of near surface permafrost ice and
that permafrost the moisture from it protected
the moss making it too moist to burn.
And so most of the moss layer is actually
preserved here.
Some has been removed but these trees you
can see they're all still standing.
The tussocks the spring after this fire burned
are already regenerating even though some
of their leaf mass was burned away and really
this this area is going to come back to just
pretty much exactly what it was before through
re-sprouting and those spruce trees we'll
see back in.
So from a fire ecologist standpoint I would
only rate this as like a moderate severity.
So thawing can lead to more fire.
But vice versa as well.
The aftermath of fire can lead to profound
and long lasting melting and subsidence in
tundra which is this picture here shows fire
on the Seward peninsula which had some pretty
dramatic effects a few years after the fire.
This happens because where we have those large
ice wedges or where the soil is maybe composed
of maybe 50 percent or so of granular ice.
When that goes away.
Then the surface drops so.
So we see these effects and it also is occurring
it occurs in boreal forest as well and can
last for some time after fire.
OK so back to fire I know you've all seen
some of this kind of thing in the literature
is this media hyperbole.
And I would propose to you that no I think
we can demonstrate that we are in fact seeing
an intensification of wildfire at least in
Alaska and in Canada and I'll show you what
I mean by that.
Here's a typical graph showing the acres burned
by year in Alaska.
Going back to 1950.
And one thing that you will notice is in the
last 20 30 years these bars that exceed the
white which is a million acres in a summer
are closer together.
And in fact we've seen that the frequency
of large fires has doubled in the last 30
years and Alaska and the acres burned goes
along with that as well.
An interesting side note is that back in the
early part of the 1960s and I wasn't here
yet.
I didn't come into the mid 1980s to Alaska
but I guess it was unusually cool in that
period especially in the summer.
And look what happened to fires in that time.
I came up here in 1986 just for one summer
to be a firefighter and I did that for a few
years and then I and then I decided I liked
Alaska pretty well and I got really interested
in wildlife and in fires and how they interacted.
And Dave Cline was kind enough to take me
on as a grad student and the rest is history.
So.
OK so another line of evidence here is that
parts of Alaska are seeing return of fire
in shorter intervals.
So this study here using the charcoal layers
and lake sediment cores shows that in some
regions of Alaska.
The interval between burning in some parts
is shorter than it has been in a very long
time.
So it's becoming clear through a multitude
of studies just how sensitive the Boreal fire
regime is to temperature and primarily of
course it's summer temperatures and the reason
has to do with this forest floor that underlies
a lot of our forests so another Jenna's showing
another duff-plug here laid out this kind
of moss can in a week or two of warm dry weather
can dry down say four inches or so and that
is actually enough for wildfires to spread
and become large.
So that is the secret and an even less time
if you're talking about the dead grass litter
and lichens out in the tundra.
Doesn't take much time to get into a fire
ready condition.
Contrast that to what is required to dry out
that heavy Woody slash in western coniferous
forests.
Where they require much more extended drought
or maybe even low winter snowpack to get into
an extreme fire situation.
But here temperature can can operate very
rapidly and so this graph here showing the
trend in the maximum daily temperatures through
time back to 1950 again shows just how dramatic
that trend has been.
The temperatures are going up.
So it's the drying of the moss that determines
fire danger.
And it's the moss that carries the fire across
the surface.
It's also the moss that has most of the biomass.
Available for burning.
So in a typical black spruce stand around
here the moss can have maybe 20 to 30 tons
per acre of biomass.
More than double than what what would be in
the trees.
So it is important source of biomass.
This is a picture from the Fort McMurray fire
in 2016.
Anybody remember that one?
It was in the early spring.
And that fire it burned up a Fairbanks sized
town.
They evacuated 88000 people it burned up the
town.
I mean the downtown the businesses the cars
the infrastructure the whole thing burned
up and about a million and a half acres of
forest with it.
And you know certainly when the insurance
losses from that event last I heard they were
over three and a half billion with a B dollars.
The largest private insurance losses in Canadian
history from any natural disaster that was
big.
And so certainly getting 90 degree temperatures
in early May in northwestern Alberta was an
extreme event.
But as the climate warms it makes extremes
like this more possible.
So now let's talk about the future a little
bit.
This is a very useful projection that Rick
Lader and a group of meteorologists just came
out with recently that tells us about the
number of very warm days to expect in the
future.
So right now the status quo is that almost
no place in Alaska is lighting up with any
PINK here that has more than 10 days over
77 degrees a year right.
Almost no pink here.
Go down to mid century however.
And by 2041 the 2070 you see a lot of pink
here in fact you see a lot of this next Rose
colar the second mark here.
So many places now have over 30 days a year
three times as many.
By mid century.
And I don't even know if I want to think about
this projection for the end of the century
when the statewide average supposedly would
be 30 days a summer and some of the places
have you know the darker color is like 60
days over 77 degrees of summer.
So now remembering that those very warm days
are what we need to dry out the fuel beds
and that actually most of the burning once
the fires start happens on those very warm
days as well.
We expect this kind of thing right here to
have a really big impact on fire danger indices
in Alaska.
And I should mention that this was done using
a business as usual climate scenario.
So that is just basically your economic driven
model of the future.
We're not all going to go out and buy electric
cars and we're not going to shut down or coal
fired power plants any time soon.
We're going to let economics and whatever
drive the selection of fuels.
So business as usual.
Doesn't seem too far out.
So the-.
Without warming also we expect to see more
lightning.
There was a study published in Science in
2014 where they tried to quantify that and
they feel that each degree Celsius of warming.
That's one point eight degrees Fahrenheit
would bring about 12 percent more lightning.
So what would that mean for burn area in Alaska.
Here's the meat of the question.
Right.
So.
Sander Veraverbeke is a colleague who is an
expert in remote sensing and modeling and
I was a minor coauthor on this study in 2017.
But he tried to again using a business as
usual climate scenario.
See how much lightning we- and how much burning
we have now.
He assembled a huge dataset of all the lightning
detection data from BLM and all the satellite
detected modis hotspots of actual fire on
the ground in Alaska over 30 years.
And he put together a picture of the status
quo which is what I'm showing you with the
red box here.
Then.
So that's kind of how much burning we've seen
since 1980 right.
And then he added five degrees Fahrenheit
and 19 millimeters for about three quarters
of an inch of rainfall.
By mid century.
And by the way if this if this looks like
fun to here I think Mike B-(unknown spelling)
from state forestry is back there somewhere
he might have a job for you.
But anyway Sander found that.
Under that scenario lightning would be up
about 59 percent with a 78 percent increase
in lightning ignited wildfires and that would
translate into burn area being up by 55 percent
or 46 if you count for a stronger feedback
by may be converting the forest to younger
stand types.
If you don't do that: Account for negative
feedback from fuels conversion and if you
just model what we've seen in climate and
what it's produced in fire acres burned over
the years you could get much higher projections.
Actually there have been several papers published
looking at 200 to 400 percent increases in
acres burned in Alaska by the end of the century.
But I think this more conservative view.
We do think there will be some negative feedback
from from fuel conversion.
At the same time.
We've seen longer fire seasons developing
in Alaska.
2016 wasn't a notable year in terms of the
acres burned but it was notable for the first
the earliest smokejumper fire on record in
67 years of smoke trapping history down by
Palmer on the Knik river.
That's what this is here.
April 17th that was.
And in mid October over here the state of
Alaska will still fighting a fairly significant
wild and urban interface fire down by Anchorage
making it a six month fire season for Alaska
which is not what- not what we expect.
Normally Memorial Day Labor Day that should
be it.
But the satellite data also shows us we're
getting fewer days of snow cover about four
fewer days per decade of snow cover.
And if you want to talk about growing seasons
we can look at that data here.
I like this graph from Rick Thoman and John
Walsh they showed this at a webinar in the
fall.
But everybody always wants to know about growing
season and if you are in the right area around
Fairbanks you could have enjoyed a 30 percent
increase in growing season.
Frost free length since 1952.
Now look at Talkeetna 41 percent, Kenai 38
percent.
So not every place you know it's certainly
variable across the state but most of the
fire prone interior has experienced this longer
growing season.
Did you hear about Bethel this year.
Bethel had a 155 day growing season.
Think about that.
So what are the force doing in the light of
no longer growing seasons are they growing
faster and with more CO2 in the atmosphere
or are the trees responding positively to
this.
Well it's interesting our northern tree species
like these poor black spruce they're not very
well adapted to take advantage of these enhanced
growing conditions.
They're very water conservative.
As soon as it gets above about 70 degrees
they just close up their stomata in their
in their leaves and their needles and they
stop photosynthesizing.
So they're not growing.
So actually we have seen more of a trend for
slower growth in most of the Interior tree
species.
Here is another example of a radio isotope
uptake studies looking at how trees taken
nutrients to grow has also documented slower
growth in most of the dominant species in
Alaska forest since 1980s interior Alaska
at the same time we realized that the forest
pests like these longer seasons warm seasons
and so things like the spruce bark beetle
can really go to town.
You probably heard about the big spruce bark
beetle outbreaks going on around Anchorage
now and the last couple of years so the forest
pests like the longer seasons but the trees
not so much.
Here's a graph from Beck et al which shows
another way to measure it by the annual tree
ring increment.
So how big is the tree ring it lays down that
year.
How much should it grow in a year.
And notice that in interior Alaska these white
spruce trees have a negative correlation between
annual ring width increment and temperature
for all the summer months May June July and
August.
Negative correlation however, in coastal Alaska
and these white spruce were from around Dillingham
they're, whether or not water limited.
They don't seem to have the same conservative
strategy anyway.
They show a positive correlation of growth
with temperature in the in the early spring
and early summer especially.
All right.
So here's a question I can't answer yet.
I would like to be able to answer this.
Are we seeing a trend for wildfires becoming
more severe you could imagine why we might
because of what I just talked about with Moss
drying and increased temperatures.
But we just don't have enough data yet.
And when I talk about severity and I'm talking
about something for house different than you're
thinking which of these pictures shows a severe
fire.
Well a lot of people are going to go on that
one.
No.
That is an intense fire with towering flame
lengths no fire 50 or 100 foot flame lengths
and lots of heat being released.
Fire intensity.
But I can't tell you yet if that fire is severe
in terms of its being very pronounced ecological
impacts.
This fire to me is severe because it has burned
away most of that moss and the trees have
toppled over because there wasn't a thing
for their roots to be in anymore.
It may have not been a very intense fire.
I mean the scorch heights on this Birch is
only a couple of feet high.
So they don't necessarily go hand in hand.
But what I can tell you is if we saw more
fires burning deeper that would transform
our forests.
So a deep burning fire like this which removes
all of the rhizomes roots and runners down
here and burns down to mineral soil.
The recovery from that fire starts from scratch
and there's an opportunity there for colonizing
types of plants maybe more grasses or willows
with wind blown seed or birch and Aspen to
come in and start a relay succession on this
site.
So if we saw more deep burning fires that
would that would make a big difference in
our fuel scapes.
Now I'd like to go from for a moment take
you to the North Slope and show you a case
study of a severe fire but this is a tundra
fire.
This was the Anaktuvuk River fire.
It started in 2007.
It was lightning caused in July.
And it started it burned this little yellow
pouch right here and then it kind of went
to sleep and then as the summer on the north
slope that year became hotter and drier it
woke up again and it went to town and it burned
all of this red and pink area most of it in
about one week in September but it just kept
burning and burning and smoldering until it
was actually covered up by snow.
Sometime in October and at the end of September
on September 30th and the satellite image
this pretty big fire now 250000 acres about
70 miles from north to south.
Big fire.
It's still smoldering here but these white
snowball looking things are the lakes actually
which have already frozen over.
So here's a plot from some of the permanent
transects we've set up.
Now I have to tell you it is very unusual
very rare to see consumption to mineral soil
like this in a tundra fire in Alaska.
I've looked for it a long time and it's very
hard to find even in anywhere in boreal forest
anywhere in Alaska.
You don't often get this.
Now if you go to California Nevada or someplace
like that you will see more of this kind of
consumption.
But this fire did have some of this effect.
Nevertheless within our transects even if
they were severely burned by about four years
what it looked like on a severely burned transect.
There's vegetation again there's some fireweeds,
Horsetail, fire mosses, and by ten years out
pretty good vegetation re-established there.
Arguably the plant productivity might be the
same as it was before the fire.
We documented some fairly substantial thawing
and melting of the ice now.
The underground ice on this fire especially
along its western extent on the Nanushuk River
where these landscape scale patches actually
gave way mass wasting again this was caused
by a tremendous amount of melting from large
ice wedges like in that photo I showed you
previously which was actually from this fire.
And even on our our transects themselves we
documented this kind of thermokarst effect
where you know this was the plot immediately
after the burn and ten years later about need
hip boots to get out there and remeasure that.
And that's not rainwater there.
That water came out of the ground.
It's a thermokarst that formed by there was-
you know a lot of ice content and that soil
and as it became warmer after the burn into
melted out, it created this slump.
So from the helicopter you can appreciate
that some of this ground was patterned at
the time of the of the burn.
These are frost created kind of cracks between
big wedges or polygons and landscape but they
were small I could step over them easily they
were maybe a foot deep.
After ten years later there's vegetation covering
this area again but the ground is more it's
more topography out there and these cracks
have become deeper as you can see that's the
same area.
Now I'm down on the ground there and some
of those cracks that were a foot deep before
are quite a bit bigger are number one on the
north end of the fire I could hide the whole
helicopter in maybe the rotor would stick
out.
That's it.
But there were some examples of places where
this really was a big effect.
Here's one our transects that this is the
end stake of a of a 50 metre transect used
to be kind of a I don't know if it was six
feet from where it is now because this whole
landscape sort of slid downhill as this thermokarst
pond formed at the end down here.
So some pretty interesting effects.
Here from the helicopter again see how smooth
it looks on the unburned side over here.
And on the other side you can really pick
up the topography now can't you?
Notice they're both vegetated.
That's plenty of vegetation on both sides
now.
So we had Dr. Ben Jones was our colleague
and he went on this field trip in 2017 as
well.
And he used a remote sensing technique called
LIDAR flown from an aircraft to- to quantify
the amount of subsidence on this whole burn
area which developed a few years after the
burn in 2009 not a big effect yet.
It's not obvious but to 2014 it's pretty obvious
that the whole area has sunk and the lidar
in this colored diagram tells us that it's
sunk from about one foot in the blue to three
feet where it's red.
It's a whole landscape scale effect which
Ben found can last for a long time.
We're talking a couple hundred years because
he was actually able to find some prehistoric
fires up on the North Slope.
By taking this knowledge and then going.
Let's look for some really rough areas that
are you know sunken with respect to nearby
areas and they were able to document a couple
really old fires so it can be a long lasting
effect.
So back to our transects they have pretty
much revegetated so you just a couple of more
pictures I guess you might say because of
this lush vegetation on the transects severe-
severely burned areas had a lot of these grasses
and of course the willows are coming in.
Would you say it's recovered.
Yeah I guess you could I guess you could say
it's recovered in one sense but the plant
communities are are not exactly the same composition
as they were before.
So the vascular plants like the grasses and
the willows and the shrubs the those kinds
of things are doing well.
The bryophytes know what I mean by bryophytes
they're like the mosses and lichens liverworts
and all those other little creatures they.
They don't grow so fast and they can't take
advantage of that deeper thaw either.
So anyway the plant communities are a little
bit different lichens.
Boy I had a hard time finding any to even
photograph I found this little sprig of regenerating
lichen or Caribou Moss you know and compared
to the size of this cotton grass seed but
only you know those would develop in places
where they're not being overtopped by competing
grasses or willows those tussocks that are
going crazy up there.
Willows- tall willows and you know these willows,
they hold snow in the winter and what does
deeper snow do on tundra on the north slope
in the winter.
Well it actually insulates it insulates the
ground from the cold so the cold can't penetrate
as deep and reform that permafrost as easily.
So it actually kind of helps the thawing process.
The other fascinating thing we found was we
found two new burn scars in our 10 year old
fire scar.
Why is that a big deal.
Well I mean this is an area where the charcoal
sediments studies again from from coring lakes
show very little record of fire on the north
slope, very infrequent.
So if you estimated fire return of what might
be a thousand years.
It's supposed to be a very long time between
fires.
But you know these fires had burned out within
10 days of us of us getting there.
Those fires had burned.
They did not burn very deep here on the ground
at that fire.
Notice that within ten days the cotton grass
has already greened up and growing vigorously
and the leaves on these shrubs that were probably
just beginning to leaf out they got scorched
but they're going to come right back.
So again vascular plants are going to respond
positively to this rebirth and it just kind
of burned away a little more of the insulation
and all the old leaf litter.
But you know what I wanted to say was that
maybe we shouldn't have been too surprised
because of the rate of warming up there on
the north slope with Utqiagvik, the town formerly
known as Barrow.
I mean think about that.
8 of its 10 warmest years in a century of
record keeping since 2010.
And we already discussed how more warming
could bring more lightning and yeah we will.
80 degrees on 3- I think we were up there
for about 10 days or a little more than that.
It was 80 degrees on the North Slope.
Three of those days and we saw three lightning
storms.
So it does seem that things are changing up
on the North Slope.
OK finally I just want to talk about this
question a little bit because I've heard it
debated a lot recently.
Are we to blame at all for this intensification
of wildfire phenomenon.
Well certainly you can't call any wildfire
a disaster unless humans are involved.
If it's just a fire out there burning the
tundra or burning the forest that's a natural
phenomenon.
But certainly what happened in Paradise California
at the Camp Fire this fall.
You know 85 fatalities and 14000 structures
destroyed.
Now that qualifies as a disaster.
So I guess more specifically let's ask the
question is with is the human contribution
to greenhouse gases and the warming that that
brought is that tipping the scale towards
these big intense wildfire events.
And there's something kind of new out there
called an attribution study where they take
the amount of warming attributable to these
greenhouse gases we produce in the post-industrial
era and they subtract them from the climate
model and it works because there's such a
crazy good relationship between global temperature
and carb- and these gases look at carbon dioxide
compared to global temperatures since 1880.
I mean they're almost in lockstep.
So.
So these if you have a supercomputer available
it's just a physics question right.
And so there was one of these studies done
recently in Alaska and they looked at the
2015 fire season anybody remember the 2015
fire season.
It was their third largest fire season burned
5.1 million acres.
The fires weren't as close to Fairbanks perhaps.
But the remarkable thing about it was that
after a fire season started in July that year.
Within two weeks we went from less than a
million acres to five million.
Four million acres basically caught on fire
in about two weeks.
It was really a rapid ramping up of events.
And if we had not had that fortuitous two
and a half inches of rain that came in the
latter part of July that year remember that?
That put a damper on things.
But if it hadn't been for that we would have
had some new all time record acres burned
that I can't even imagine.
So these this group with Partain et al.
They use the UAF supercomputing facility and
they looked at-.
They looked at the weather, the human caused
portion of the climate being warmer would
have contributed to the 2015 fuel and weather
conditions that year.
And what they found is basically is that those
conditions were 34 to 60 percent more likely
to occur in the anthropogenically changed
climate than in the pre-industrial climate.
And it's not just Alaska.
Here is the California attribution study.
And in this study they're looking at the number
extreme fire danger days a year on the scale
and again a Partain study.
And this one is well they we're all using
the same climate projection here.
The business as usual climate projection for
this.
And notice that until about 1990 and 1970
somewhere in there there was about 10 such
days a year.
10 extreme fire danger days a year.
The pre-industrial climate would continue
at that rate but adding then the amount of
gases in the post-industrial time and the
warming that they brought by now we're up
to 30 days a year 30 days extreme fire danger
days a year.
And the projections look like they are going
to continue that as the climate continues
to warm primarily due to the influence of
temperature on this Keetch Byram Drought Index
the black line which is a big indicator of
fire danger and risk in California.
So.
I guess thinking about this.
I mean we we we shouldn't be surprised we
keep hearing about California in the news.
It seems like every year now do you realize
that they've actually had five of their all
time most destructive fires since 2010.
So.
I guess in conclusion it does appear that
we're likely to see more wildfire in Alaska
as the climate warms something on the order
of 50 to 200 percent more by mid or the end
of the century.
However it's hard to say what's going to happen
without considering climate and also permafrost
hydrology forest conditions and composition
but all of these things have their own experts
and that's why at University of Alaska they're
developing some interdisciplinary teams to
look at some of these big questions including
one called Epscor fire and ice.
I saw a couple of the PI's for that are actually
here in the room tonight and they just won
a round of funding from the National Science
Foundation.
So I'm really looking forward to seeing what
comes out of that study.
A six year study.
So finally such a discussion really leads
to the question of.
What can we do about an intensifying wildfire
regime.
And the same discussions are going on in California
now let me assure you bills are being written
et cetera.
So I'm pleased to say that we also have staff
here tonight from the North Star Borough Department
of Emergency Services Baird Stiefel and Bill
W(spelling unknown) over there and they've
got some sign up things here.
They're actually starting a process whereby
they want to look at how to make Fairbanks
a more fire safe and fire resistant community
so you might want to stop by and get a business
card or get on their mailing list for that.
And with that I guess we'll take some questions
if there are any.
