climate change and wildfire research at the pnw station: past, present, future
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Climate change and wildfire Research at the PNW Station: past, present, future. Don McKenzie (TCM/FERA) with contributions from. Paul Hessburg Becky Flitcroft. Sim Larkin John Kim. PNW Science Day March 12, 2014. Seneviratne et al. (2014). - PowerPoint PPT PresentationTRANSCRIPT
Climate change and wildfire Research at the PNW Station: past, present,
future
Don McKenzie (TCM/FERA)
with contributions from
PNW Science Day March 12, 2014
• Paul Hessburg• Becky Flitcroft
• Sim Larkin• John Kim
Rationale✤ It’s getting warm down here.
✤ No “hiatus” in hot extremes over land.
✤ More area is expected to burn.
✤ What we care about is how fire climatology translates to the issues and scales relevant to land management.
• Fire effects: tree mortality, smoke and air quality, habitat structure and pattern, regeneration and forest succession.
• Time domains: immediate (to 2020s), next generation (2040s), long-term (2060s and beyond). Uncertainties grow non-linearly over time.
• Space domains: cross-scale, from watersheds (“landscapes”) to the region.
• Specificity: fire regimes. It’s not about individual fires or “my favorite pixel”.
Seneviratne et al. (2014)
(though not so much as on this map)
Past and present research (1)
✤ Drivers of area burned
✤ Fire-climate models at the scales of ecosections project that the West will burn up.
✤ Expectation breaks down because there are limitations.
• Fire area can’t keep increasing because fires will run out of real estate.
• “Hotter and drier = more fire” doesn’t work everywhere. Best in the dark green ecosections.
Expectation: Hotter and drier = more fire!
Correlations between annual area burned and water-balance deficit
Temperate rain forests: extreme weather causes rare wildfires.
Transitional forests: drought stress will increase fire extent and severity.
Arid forests: fire extent and severity may actually decrease.
Past and present research (2)
✤ Smoke and air quality (AirFire/FERA — Larkin/McKenzie)
✤ Smoke modeling framework (BlueSky) that accepts either observed or simulated (i.e., future) fires.
✤ Stochastic fire simulator tuned to the spatio-temporal domains of air-quality models.
McKenzie et al. (2014)
Past and present research (3)
✤ Future megafires (AirFire/FERA — Larkin/McKenzie)
✤ Expectation of more extreme events based on projections of future fire weather.
✤ Representing all the factors that combine to produce a megafire.
• Weather pre-ignition conditions fuels.• Weather on the day or hour of the fire.• Escapes initial attack? (hard to model but a big
source of uncertainty)• Weather in days or weeks following fire.
✤ How will this change in a warming climate?• Downscaling climate models.• Different regions will see different fire weather
(not always hotter and drier).
Stavros et al. (2014)
Past and present research (4)
✤ Fire and landscape dynamics (EPF/CLI — Hessburg)
✤ Patch-size distributions associated with future climate.• Topographic controls based on terrain patch structure.• Endogenous vs. exogenous controls on fire & other disturbance.
✤ Restore and maintain ecosystem function in future climate.• Use topography as a template.• Patch structure and tree density tuned to “climate analog” reference conditions
rather than HRV.• Anticipate patterns of fire severity and seral stages.
Past and present research (5)
✤ Fire, climate change, and bull trout vulnerability (LWM/AEM — Flitcroft)
✤ Patch-size distributions associated with future climate.
✤ Habitat extent of cold water aquatic species is vulnerable to climate change.
✤ Climate change may isolate small patches of habitat, often in the headwaters of a watershed.
✤ Wildfire may compound the negative effects of climate change for cold water species.
✤ Some management action to reduce wildfire effects may serve to protect some cold water aquatic refugia.
Past and present research (6)
✤ Process-based modeling of climate, vegetation, fire (EPF/CLI — Kim)
✤ MC2 DGVM simulates vegetation-fire interactions at multiple scales.• Global, CONUS, regional.
• Currently studying R6, R5, R4, R1, and Blue Mountains Ecoregion.
✤ MC1-based Seasonal Drought and Fire Forecasting System creates 7-month fire and drought forecasts, updated monthly.
✤ Downscaled output from CMIP5 GCM projections used to drive DGVM and predict changes in fire.
Projections of biomass consumed by wildfire:1951-2000. vs. 2050-2099
Future research (1): categories
• Field & remote-sensing studies‣ Fire and succession
‣ Fire and other disturbances
‣ Fire and carbon
• Theory‣ Conceptual models
‣ Scaling
‣ Extreme events and thresholds
• Models‣ Landscape projections
‣ Process AND empirical
‣ “As simple as possible, but no simpler”
Fire
Subalpine fire and succession (Cansler 2014)
Kellogg et al. (2008)
Future research (2): questions
• How much, how quickly?‣ High-severity patches
‣ Carbon source
‣ Air quality
• Where?‣ Vulnerable landscapes
‣ Thresholds for species and life forms (e.g., forest shrubland)➛
‣ Thresholds for processes (e.g., habitat connectivity)
• What can we do?‣ Resistance (short-term)
‣ Resilience (mid-term)
‣ Adaptation (start now)
?
The end