Collaborative Research: GCR: Managing Future Risk of Increasing Simultaneous Megafires

University Corporation For Atmospheric Res, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

Megafires are fires that are unusually large for their location or that require a complex and aggressive firefighting response because they pose a dramatic threat to lives, property, and/or infrastructure. When multiple megafires occur simultaneously in the U.S., national firefighting resources may be strained beyond capacity. A convergent team of researchers with expertise in decision science, climate science, statistics, and fire science in collaboration with on the ground decision makers and stakeholders, including fire managers, fire ecologists, and land managers for tribes and government agencies will work together to push the frontiers of fire science and management at the intersection of natural and human systems. Their goal is to inform management decisions about the risk posed by catastrophic wildfire events with improved short and long term climate projections. The research will support decisions about land use, as well as fuel management (thinning and prescribed burning), and wildfire suppression policy, thereby helping to safeguard society against the future loss of life, property, infrastructure, and natural resources. The project will model future patterns and uncertainty in the simultaneous co-occurrence of megafire events to inform fire risk management. In doing so, it aims to address two central questions: (1) How will climate change alter future patterns of wildfire, particularly co-occurring megafires? (2) What implications does this hold for risk management decisions? The project will include development of statistical models to represent relationships between biogeophysical and human factors (e.g., ignitions, suppression policy, land and fuel management), and firefighting resource demand at geographical scales relevant to firefighting management decision-making. These resource demand and risk management models will be based on wildfire characteristics, climate, weather and land history covariates. The research will consider three hypotheses as they relate to future wildfire activity. First, the researchers hypothesize that ignition efficiency will increase further with warming, facilitating increased lightning-ignitions, and consequently increases in simultaneous wildfire events. Second, they hypothesize that a positive feedback may occur where fire suppression resources at the national level become strained, reducing the efficacy of managing active fires and new ignitions, and further increasing resource strain and relative burned area. Third, they hypothesize that short term fire management decisions (e.g., both fuel management and fire suppression) have significant delayed impacts, and demand new scientifically supported decision tools that explicitly account for the continuing interaction of natural and human systems. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.