A long history of fire suppression in the western United States has significantly changed forest structure and ecological function, leading to increasingly uncharacteristic fires in terms of size and severity. Prior analyses of fire severity in California forests showed that time since last fire and fire weather conditions predicted fire severity very well, while a larger regional analysis show...

We developed a methodology to evaluate the efficacy of fuel treatments by estimating their costs and potential costs/losses with and without treatments in the San Jacinto Ranger District of the San Bernardino National Forest, California. This district is a typical southern California forest complex containing a large amount of high-valued real estate. We chose four sites to represent different ...

RC: “Authors didn’t mention about the aerosol-retrieval uncertainties over the land, especially during large-scale fire events” AC: This has been mentioned in other papers we have cited and already performed over this region (Cohen, 2014; Cohen et al., 2017). However, for clarity the values will be added into this paper. There are two issues, the first with cloud cover, in which a bias may exis...

We present an assessment of the impact of future climate change on two key drivers of fire risk in Australia, fire weather and fuel load. Fire weather conditions are represented by the McArthur Forest Fire Danger Index (FFDI), calculated from a 12-member regional climate model ensemble. Fuel load is predicted from net primary production, simulated using a land surface model forced by the same r...

Increasing numbers of homes are being destroyed by wildfire in the wildland-urban interface. With projections of climate change and housing growth potentially exacerbating the threat of wildfire to homes and property, effective fire-risk reduction alternatives are needed as part of a comprehensive fire management plan. Land use planning represents a shift in traditional thinking from trying to ...

Non-deforestation fire – i.e., fire that is typically followed by the recovery of natural vegetation – is arguably the most influential disturbance in terrestrial ecosystems, thereby playing a major role in carbon exchanges and affecting many climatic processes. The radiative effect from a given atmospheric CO2 perturbation is the same for fire and fossil fuel combustion. However, major differe...

BACKGROUND Forecasting the effects of global changes on high altitude ecosystems requires an understanding of the long-term relationships between biota and forcing factors to identify resilience thresholds. Fire is a crucial forcing factor: both fuel build-up from land-abandonment in European mountains, and more droughts linked to global warming are likely to increase fire risks. METHODS To a...

This paper presents a development of the forest fire detection algorithm for upcoming GCOM-C1/SGLI sensor. Several existing fire detection algorithms which are applied to GOES/VAS, NOAA/AHVRR, Terra Aqua/MODIS sensors mainly use the MIR fire channels(3-4μm) for key role of the fire detection algorithm. Meanwhile, because of lack of the MIR fire channel on GCOM-C1/SGLI, fire detection algorithm ...

Fire is an integral Earth System process that interacts with climate in multiple ways. Here we assessed the parametrization of fires in the Community Land Model (CLM-CN) and improved the ability of the model to reproduce contemporary global patterns of burned areas and fire emissions. In addition to wildfires we extended CLMCN to account for fires related to deforestation. We compared contempor...