Treesearch

We investigated relationships between the spatial patterns of burn severity in Chinese boreal forests and weather parameters. Patch size, shape and arrangement differed between high-severity and low/moderate-severity patches.Wind speed and relative humidity were dominant weather parameters of spatial variation in burn severity. Patch size negatively correlated with relative humidity; patch complexity and aggregation positively correlated with wind speed.

Climate change is challenging scientists and decision-makers to understand the complexities of climate change and to predict the related effects at scales relevant to environmental policy and the management of ecosystem services. Extraordinary change in climate, and the ensuing impacts to ecosystem services, are widely anticipated for the southwestern United States. Predicting the vulnerability of Southwest ecosystems and their components has been a priority of natural resource organizations over the past decade. Supplementing vulnerability assessments in the region with geospatial inputs...

Large outdoor fires present a risk to the built environment. Examples often in the international media reports are wildfires that spread into communities, referred to as Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) fires. WUI fires have destroyed communities throughout the world and are a growing problem in fire safety science. Other examples are large urban fires, including those that have occurred after earthquakes.

The following study examines the role of streaklike coherent structures in mixed convection via a horizontal heated boundary layer possessing an unheated starting length. The three-dimensionality of flows in this configuration, which is regularly encountered in practical scenarios, has been experimentally probed using non-invasive detection methods. Experiments were conducted in a wind tunnel at the Missoula Fire Sciences Lab, and the wind speed was varied from 0.70 to 2.47 m/s. The buoyant source was varied significantly by either manipulating the surface temperature of a downstream hot...

Wildland fire managers in the United States currently utilize the gridded forecasts from the National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD) to make fire behavior predictions across complex landscapes during large wildfires. However, little is known about the NDFDs performance in remote locations with complex topography for weather variables important for fire behavior prediction, including air temperature, relative humidity, and wind speed. In this study NDFD forecasts for calendar year 2015 were evaluated in fire-prone locations across the conterminous United States during periods with the...

Previous reviews of wildfires where a fatal firefighter burnover occurred have found that the incidents usually share similar characteristics in terms of the fire environment, such as steep slopes and complex topography (e.g. box canyons). Despite these similarities, systematic identification and communication of the locations where these conditions prevail are rare. In this study we used a presence-only machine-learning algorithm (Maximum Entropy, MaxEnt) coupled with spatial location information from past fatal firefighter burnovers to identify and characterise the environmental variables...

Key message: We describe a modeling system that enables detailed, 3D fire simulations in forest fuels. Using data from three sites, we analyze thinning fuel treatments on fire behavior and fire effects and compare outputs with a more commonly used model. Context: Thinning is considered useful in altering fire behavior, reducing fire severity, and restoring resilient ecosystems. Yet, few tools currently exist that enable detailed analysis of such efforts. Aims: The study aims to describe and demonstrate a new modeling system. A second goal is to put its capabilities in context of previous...

This work investigates gap winds in a steep, deep river canyon prone to wildland fire. The driving mechanisms and the potential for forecasting the gap winds are investigated. The onset and strength of the gap winds are found to be correlated to the formation of an along-gap pressure gradient linked to periodic development of a thermal trough in the Pacific Northwest, USA. Numerical simulations are performed using a reanalysis dataset to investigate the ability of numerical weather prediction (NWP) to simulate the observed gap wind events, including the timing and flow characteristics...

Although most phenology models can predict vegetation response to climatic variations, these models often perform poorly in precipitation-limited regions. In this study, we modified a phenology model, called the Growing Season Index (GSI), to better quantify relationships between weather and vegetation canopy dynamics across various semi-arid regions of Iraq. A modified GSI was created by adding a cumulative precipitation control to the existing GSI framework. Both unmodified and modified GSI values were calculated daily from 2001 to 2010 for three locations in Eastern Iraq: Sulaymaniyah...

Large outdoor fires present a risk to the built environment. Wildfires that spread into communities, referred to as Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) fires, have destroyed communities throughout the world, and are an emerging problem in fire safety science. Other examples are large urban fires including those that have occurred after earthquakes. Research into large outdoor fires, and how to potentially mitigate the loss of structures in such fires, lags other areas of fire safety science research. At the same time, common characteristics between fire spread in WUI fires and urban fires have...