Wildfires and other fire incidents

weatheriscool
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Oak Fire updates: 'Explosive fire behavior' in Mariposa County destroys structures
Source: Fresno Bee

The fast-moving Oak Fire in Mariposa County grew more than 2,000 acres overnight, burning an estimated 6,555 acres by Saturday morning after igniting the day before.

Cal Fire said the wildfire was still 0% contained Saturday. The blaze is threatening an estimated 2,000 structures, destroyed 10 and damaged five, Cal Fire reported.

Multiple areas are ordered to evacuate, and there are many road closures. Evacuation orders extended from the Jerseydale area in the north to around Bootjack in the south and are listed on the Mariposa County Public Information Map. A number of other residents to the south and west were under a fire advisory, asked to be prepared to leave if necessary.

“Fire activity is extreme with frequent runs, spot fires and group torching,” Cal Fire officials said of the Oak Fire. “Emergency personnel are working to safely evacuate people and are actively engaged in protecting structures. Explosive fire behavior is challenging firefighters.”
Read more: https://www.fresnobee.com/news/californ ... 59768.html
weatheriscool
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US takes emergency action to save sequoias from wildfires
Source: AP

By BRIAN MELLEY
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The U.S. Forest Service announced Friday it’s taking emergency action to save giant sequoias by speeding up projects that could start within weeks to clear underbrush to protect the world’s largest trees from the increasing threat of wildfires.

The move to bypass some environmental review could cut years off the normal approval process required to cut smaller trees in national forests and use intentionally lit low-intensity fires to reduce dense brush that has helped fuel raging wildfires that have killed up to 20% of all large sequoias over the past two years.

“Without urgent action, wildfires could eliminate countless more iconic giant sequoias,” Forest Service Chief Randy Moore said in a statement. “This emergency action to reduce fuels before a wildfire occurs will protect unburned giant sequoia groves from the risks of high-severity wildfires.”

The trees, the world’s largest by volume, are under threat like never before. More than a century of aggressive fire suppression has left forests choked with dense vegetation, downed logs and millions of dead trees killed by bark beetles that have fanned raging infernos intensified by drought and exacerbated by climate change.




Read more: https://apnews.com/article/wildfires-sc ... 08a4895a55
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Thousands ordered to flee California wildfire near Yosemite
Source: AP

By NOAH BERGER and JOCELYN GECKER

WAWONA, Calif. (AP) — A fast-moving brush fire near Yosemite National Park exploded in size Saturday into one of California’s largest wildfires of the year, prompting evacuation orders for thousands of people and shutting off power to more than 2,000 homes and businesses.

The Oak Fire started Friday afternoon southwest of the park near the town of Midpines in Mariposa County and by Saturday had grown to nearly 15 square miles (38 square kilometers), according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire. It erupted as firefighters made progress against an earlier blaze that burned to the edge of a grove of giant sequoias in the southernmost part of Yosemite park.

Evacuation orders were put in effect Saturday for over 6,000 people living across a several-mile span in the sparsely populated, rural area, said Daniel Patterson, a spokesman for the Sierra National Forest.

More than 400 firefighters were battling the blaze, along with helicopters, other aircraft and bulldozers, facing tough conditions that included hot weather, low humidity and bone-dry vegetation caused by the worst drought in decades, Patterson said.



Read more: https://apnews.com/article/wildfires-fi ... b4eb8a64fe
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caltrek
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New Methodology Helps Predict Soil Recovery After Wildfires
July 25, 2022

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) Washington, D.C. - Soils influence water quality, and they are critical to plant growth. However, it has been difficult to predict how plant growth and water quality would change in the wake of wildfires. Now, a team of Colorado investigators has devised new methodology to enable such predictions. The research is published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology.

“To make practical predictions about recovery, we had to use a modern artificial intelligence tool called statistical learning,” said John Spear, Ph.D., professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, Colo. “When we fed data about the microbes and nutrients into this model, we were able to predict how soil is changed by fire far more accurately.”

Spear emphasized that combining information on the types and quantities of both microbes and nutrients increased accuracy. Another intriguing discovery was that including microbiota that are uncommon in soil—those that constituted less than 1% of the microbiome—was critical to the predictions’ accuracy.

“This apparent contradiction is a fascinating outcome of our study and runs contrary to the common wisdom that if we measure 99% of what’s living in soil, we’ll have a great sense of how that soil will behave,” said first author Alexander S. Honeyman, Ph.D., research associate at the Colorado School of Mines.

The investigators were also able to predict water quality by analyzing the microbiome for species that affect both soil regeneration and downstream waters, said Spear, who added that the methodology may lead to a better understanding of both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystem recovery post-wildfire.
Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/959656
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caltrek
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California Oak Fire Rages Out of Control
by Jake Johnson
July 24, 2022

Introduction:
(Common Dreams) Thousands of emergency workers in California struggled to fight a rapidly growing wildfire near Yosemite National Park on Sunday as President Joe Biden continued to mull whether to declare a national climate emergency, a move that campaigners say is needed to respond to the immediate threat of extreme weather and lay the groundwork for a livable future.

Dubbed the Oak Fire, the California blaze was completely uncontained as of Sunday afternoon, having tripled in size since it began on Friday. The fire has now burned more than 14,000 acres, making it California's largest wildfire of the season.

"Explosive fire behavior is challenging firefighters," Cal Fire said in a statement Saturday, characterizing the blaze as "extreme with frequent runs, spot fires, and group torching." Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency for Mariposa County on Saturday as authorities urged thousands in the potential path of the fire to evacuate immediately.
Read more here: https://www.commondreams.org/news/202 ... mergency
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caltrek
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Image
Image Credit: NASA
(Space.com) Tuesday, July 26, 2022: NASA's Earth-observing satellite Landsat 9 captured this image of a wildfire that erupted in California's Yosemite National Park on Friday (July 22).

The image reveals the extent of the burnt area as well as the active fire line where hundreds of firefighters are battling to stop the flames. The blaze, dubbed the Oak Fire, has devoured over 25 square miles (65 square kilometers) of parched forest over the weekend.

The fire, experts believe, was helped by the progressing climate change, which exacerbates California's droughts, stripping vegetation of moisture in a way unseen before. – Tereza Pultarova
Source: https://www.space.com/34-image-day.html
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caltrek
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Complex Modeling by Researchers Predicts Wildfires May Eventually Decline
July 27, 2022

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) RENO, Nev. – Researchers attempting to help predict how the wildfire hazard will change due to various factors over the next several decades have some good news, and some bad news. Good news is, wildfire occurrence and intensity will likely decrease in several locations in the future. The bad news: decreases may not occur for another 50 years, and wildfire hazard will likely get worse before it gets better.

“There are so many factors that we need to consider and better understand if we want to predict how the frequency, size and intensity of wildfires will change over time,” said Erin Hanan, a University of Nevada, Reno researcher with the University’s Experiment Station and an assistant professor in the College of Agriculture, Biotechnology & Natural Resources. “Our two studies looked at how changes in temperature, rainfall, and atmospheric carbon dioxide may interact with and influence plant growth, turnover and decomposition, and how those processes in turn affect fuel loading and fuel moisture in different plant communities, which are two key factors driving wildfire regimes in the West.”
Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/960100

Here is a review of the results of one of the studies: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.co ... MS002818

Results of the second study: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.co ... 1EF002518

Here is a plain language summary taken from the second study:
(AGU Publications) While many studies have projected increases in wildfire under future climate change, fire may eventually decrease in some locations. The direction and extent of fire regime changes depend in large part on how decreases in fuel moisture balance against increases or decreases in fuel loading, which can occur in response to warmer temperatures and increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations. The balance between fuel moisture and loading, and their relative importance in driving fire regimes can vary along moisture gradients in western North America. To project how wildfire size, frequency, and severity will change in a relatively arid watershed of the northwestern United States throughout the 21st century, we used a coupled vegetation, water, and fire spread model. We found that wildfire is likely to increase in the mid-21st century due to an increase in fuel production and drier fuel. However, wildfire will likely to decrease in the late-21st century due to warming-induced increases in fuel decomposition, even when fuels are drier. We demonstrate that future wildfire regimes are dynamic, so the linear extrapolation of fire size from the baseline and 2040s scenarios to the 2070s may not always be a suitable approach, and we need to consider complex fuel responses to climate change. Predicting future wildfires will require reducing key uncertainties in future precipitation patterns and understanding how CO2 fertilization affects plant growth.
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Researchers Find that Smoke from Western Wildfires Can Influence Arctic Sea Ice
July 27, 2022

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) Sea ice and wildfires may be more interconnected than previously thought, according to new research out today in Science Advances
( https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abo2405 ).

By digging into differences between climate models, researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) found that soot and other burned biomass from wildfires here in Colorado and elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere can eventually make their way to the Arctic. Once there, it can affect how much—or how little—sea ice persists at any given time.

This, in turn, can cause ripple effects on climatic patterns for the rest of the globe, reinforcing a feedback loop between the two systems in a way that hasn’t been previously seen.

“This research found that particles emitted from wildfires where people live can really impact what happens in the Arctic thousands of miles away,” said Patricia DeRepentigny (PhDAtmos’21), the lead author on the paper and a postdoctoral fellow at NCAR.

“Sometimes the Arctic can be seen as this region that we shouldn’t care about because it’s so far away from where we live … but the fact that there’s this back-and-forth of what happens here with the wildfires can affect the sea ice, and a diminishing sea ice can then lead to more wildfires here, connects us with the Arctic a little bit more.”
Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/960154
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Western Wildfire Smoke Plumes are Getting Taller
July 27, 2022

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) In recent years the plumes of smoke crawling upward from Western wildfires have trended taller, with more smoke and aerosols lofted up where they can spread farther and impact air quality over a wider area. The likely cause is climate change, with decreased precipitation and increased aridity in the Western U.S. that intensifies wildfire activity.

“Should these trends persist into the future,” says Kai Wilmot, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Utah, “it would suggest that enhanced Western U.S. wildfire activity will likely correspond to increasingly frequent degradation of air quality at local to continental scales.”
Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/960113 and here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-16607-3
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