UC Riverside engineers are developing methods to estimate the impact of California's destructive wildfires on air quality in neighborhoods affected by the smoke from these fires.
Irvine, Calif., April 22, 2021 — California’s wildfire problem, fueled by a concurrence of climate change and a heightened risk of human-caused ignitions in once uninhabited areas, has been getting worse with each passing year of the 21st century. Researchers in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Irvine have conducted a thorough analysis of California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection wildfire statistics from 2000 to 2019, comparing them with data from 1920 to 1999.
Just adapting to climate change is not something the world can afford to do. So, the CSU is exploring all options to thwart potentially disastrous consequences.
The study, led by NAU's Michelle Mack, began after the 2004 fire season in Alaska, which led to a dramatic shift in the trees that grew in the area. Researchers found the aspen and birch trees absorbed more carbon more quickly than the black spruce it replaced.
Reliance on petroleum fuels and raging wildfires: Two separate, large-scale challenges that could be addressed by one scientific breakthrough. Researchers from two national laboratories have collaborated to develop a streamlined and efficient process for converting woody plant matter like forest overgrowth and agricultural waste – material that is currently burned either intentionally or unintentionally – into liquid biofuel.
Growing up in rural South Africa, Michelle Bester always aspired to pursue graduate school internationally. Today, she is living that dream as a geography student studying how remote sensing technology can help prevent and control wildfires.
A first-of-its-kind instrument that samples smoke from megafires and scans humidity will help researchers better understand the scale and long-term impact of fires—specifically how far and high the smoke will travel, when and where it will rain, and whether the wet smoke will warm the climate by absorbing sunlight.
Every year, an estimated four percent of the world's vegetated land surface burns, leaving more than 250 megatons of carbonized plants behind. For the first time, a study by the University of Vienna has now recorded elevated concentrations of environmentally persistent free radicals (EPFR) in these charcoals - in some cases even up to five years after the fire.
Prof. Ilan Koren at the Weizmann Institute and Dr. Eitan Hirsch have identified another impact of Australia’s massive wildfires: smoke particles from the country’s southeast actually reached the stratosphere. They then traveled on a steady current that carried them around the world, covering and lingering above much of the Southern Hemisphere.
Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory and partners have used modeling to highlight the large impact that small changes in wind conditions can have on low-intensity fires or prescribed burns.
Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory and partners have used modeling to highlight the large impact that small changes in wind conditions can have on low-intensity fires or prescribed burns.
The grant, led by SICCS professors Fatemeh Afghah and Abolfazi Razi and Regents' professor Peter Fulé, will give firefighters a better situational awareness about the fire environment; provide up-to-date information on where the fire is; and help fire responders form reliable predictions about the fire activity.
ORNL story tips: Quantum building blocks, high-pressure diamonds, wildfire ecology, quick cooling tooling and printing on the fly
Scientists at Argonne developed a climate model that projects future conditions at neighborhood-level scale across the entire United States to help PG&E plan for extreme weather events in California.
In a long-term study in a Salt Lake-area building, researchers found that the amount of air pollution that comes indoors depends on the type of outdoor pollution. Wildfires, fireworks and wintertime inversions all affect indoor air to different degrees.
DHS S&T recently conducted a virtual training on its Team Awareness Kit (TAK) that provides such features as video sharing, location tracking of fire equipment, fire perimeters from aircraft, and fire model forecasts.
UC San Diego researchers report that climate change is a chronic mental health stressor, and promotes a variety of mental health problems. The 2018 Camp Fire is a case study.
A new 3D analysis shows that wildland fires flare up in forests populated by similar-sized trees or checkerboarded by large clearings and slow down where trees are more varied.
Phosphorous, calcium and charcoal in spotty patches of fertile soil in the Amazon rainforest suggest that natural processes such as fires and river flooding, not the ingenuity of indigenous populations, created rare sites suitable for agriculture, according to new research.
A new study led by researchers in the Geography Department at Swansea University reveals the extreme scale of loss and fragmentation of tropical forests, which once covered much of the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Kalimantan.
Wildfire smoke contains microbes, infectious agents that might cause diseases. In a perspective piece published in Science, researchers at UC Davis Health and the University of Idaho proposed a multidisciplinary approach to study the health impacts of microbes carried by wildfire smokes.
The 2020 wildfires on the West Coast stymied planned research at the University of California Blue Oak Ranch Reserve, but also created a rare chance to catch the first link in the chain that connects fire-derived “black carbon” from a charred hillside with the deep ocean.
PNNL researchers investigate the environmental conditions, from soil moisture to surface temperature, that precede wildfire.
The Clackamas Basin rarely experiences the intense fire activity that burned in the watershed during the Labor Day fires, but new research out of Portland State University shows that wildfires like the Riverside Fire, which grew to 138,000 acres within days, could become more common under a warming climate, even under non-extreme wind conditions.
Irvine, Calif., Dec. 7, 2020 — In 2018, California wildfires caused economic losses of nearly $150 billion, or about 0.7 percent of the gross domestic product of the entire United States that year, and a considerable fraction of those costs affected people far from the fires and even outside of the Golden State. For a study published today in Nature Sustainability, researchers at the University of California, Irvine, China’s Tsinghua University and other institutions combined physical, epidemiological and economic models to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the impact of the blazes.
The number of wildfires and the amount of land they consume in the western U.S. has substantially increased since the 1980s, a trend often attributed to ongoing climate change.
2020 is the worst fire year on record in the United States. In the face of heartbreaking losses, effort and expense, scientists are still grappling with some of the most basic questions about how fire influences interactions between plants and animals in the natural world. A new study grounded in the northern Rockies explores the role of fire in the finely tuned dance between plants and their pollinators.
Changes in fire activity are putting at risk more than 4,400 species across the globe, says a new paper led by the University of Melbourne, involving 27 international researchers.
The biggest study yet of West Coast wildfire plumes shows how a smoke plume’s chemistry changes over time. Results suggest current models may not accurately predict the air quality downwind of a wildfire.
To mask or not to mask - and which mask to use? With public health guidance about masks in the United States confused by political hedging, clarity around mask use is increasingly important, especially as the western U.S. battles the twin crises of wildfire smoke and COVID-19.
Northern Arizona University researcher Xanthe Walker is the lead author on research published this week that found that the amount of carbon stored in soils was the biggest predictor of how much carbon would combust and that soil moisture also was significant in predicting carbon release.
Immediate actions are needed to limit the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving climate change that helps fuel wildfires, a Monash University study says.
A University of Adelaide-led research project will study the clinical data of koalas injured in last summer’s devastating bushfires to give them the best possible chance of survival and recovery in future bushfires.
Wildfire indices and high-resolution climate models combine to produce a detailed historical analysis of wildfire events across the U.S. and suggest the potential for more severe and frequent fires in the latter half of the century.
In recent years -- and 2020 is no exception -- parts of the Pacific Northwest that are typically too wet to burn are experiencing more frequent, severe and larger wildfires due to changes in climate.
DHS S&T's Smart City Internet of Things Innovation (SCITI) Labs program is bringing together government and private sector partners to identify technologies that can detect and alert emergency management, utilities, and citizens of a threatening wildfire.
As wildfires continue to burn across western U.S. states, those with respiratory illnesses such as asthma need to be alert to the effects of smoke on their breathing.
A new observational study has revealed a decreasing burned area trend that could impact African ecosystems.
Evan Kane, soil carbon expert, is available to speak about how increasingly severe wildfires are accelerating the climate change feedback loop.
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