The climate crisis will increase the pace of forest fires that highlight lightning, and find study forest fires star-news.press/wp

The climate crisis will continue to make forest fires that exceed lightning frequently for decades, which may result in successive effects and exacerbation of public safety and public health, as experts and new research indicate.

Fires that caused lightning tend to combustion in remote areas, and thus usually grow into larger fires than human fires. This means that the trend towards more fires caused by lightning may make forest fires more deadly by producing more fire smoke and helping to lead an increase in air quality from the coast to the coast, Especially during the past few years.

Over the past forty years, thunderstorms and other weather conditions prefer lightning It has often happened Through many parts of the west of the United States, including West two West, West Oregon, California Central Valley, and higher heights throughout the Rocky Mountains.

This trend is not only in the United States. The firefighting season for this year was the worst in European history, partially driven Forest fires resulting from lightning in Spain. In Canada, huge fires this year burned more than 200 % of the area of ​​normal forests, and the vast majority of them were caused by lightning.

Despite the well -documented trend towards the deterioration of fires, most climate models were very rough to resolve how the relationship between lightning and forest fires would change with the deepening of the climate crisis.

A New study It was published last week is the first to use automated learning techniques to address this problem, as he simultaneously searches for future changes in lightning frequency and changes in weather variables such as air temperature, humidity, wind moisture and soil that can predict the extent of the possibility of the fire.

“The total signal is that we will face more danger of fires that caused lightning,” said Dmitry Kalashnikov, a climate scientist at the Sierra Nevada Research Institute at the University of California and the study author.

The results come with the transformation of this year’s forest fire season in the United States into high equipment in a frightening way that Kalashnikov imagines for the future – advanced forward after a series of dry storms that California tears earlier this week.

Thousands of lightning strikes This week raised at least 20 new fires and burned tens of thousands of acres across the Central Valley in California and to Sierra Nevada, with one fire that destroys several structures in the settlement of the Golden Status in the Chinese camp east of Modesto.

The Kalashnikov team found that some places, such as the northwest of the inner Pacific Ocean, will witness a lame mutation with a relatively small increase in the risk of total fires due to a moisturizing environment. Other places, such as the southwestern desert, will witness an increase in the risk of a wildfire without a significant change in the number of days with lightning due to the general trend towards the most widespread drought.

Despite these regional differences, the result was clear: actually, everyone will deal with more fire risks in the future. In fact, the Kalashnikov team found future increases in the number of forest fires caused by lightning across 98 % of the western United States “due to more lightning, or more of the fire, or both.”

In a future world with limited firefighting resources, the effects of more forest fires caused by lightning cause anxiety.

For 15 years, the Hashim smoke killed about a thousand people in the United States every year. An increase in fires caused by lightning may cause the smoke epidemic in America to take a possible life More than 20,000 people annually by the middle of the century.

In addition to the increase in the dangers of fires in the wildfire, the Kalashnikov study found that the greatest effect of the expected increase in thunderstorms and lightning in some parts of the West could be an increase in floods and muddrops, especially in recently burned areas. More smokes of more fires that light It can make them melt more quickly.

Due to its distant nature, the forest fires that caused lightning tend to deplete the ability to respond to the emergency away from urban areas.

“To this day, the sudden lightning storm” can really extend resources, which is really thin “for weeks during the peak season in the wild.

“You may have a week or two at a later time, you may have a big event for the winds of Santa Anna, then you have a real recipe for a disaster,” Mauritz said.

When the direction of urbanization in the areas exposed to the fire that we see throughout the West is associated with, a world with worse strange fires can put additional pressure on the insurance industry that calms billions of dollars from claims from this year’s fires in Los Angeles alone.

In the United States, firefighting resources at the country level extend as a result of the Trump administration discounts to the National Oceanic and Air Force Administration, the national park service and a group of other federal agencies with employees throughout the West. As of late July, more than a quarter of all functions of fire control remained vacant in the American Forest Authority, and a modern immigration raid within the active firefighting crew in Oregon And according to the low morale of the firefighters.

Mauritz sees a possible partial solution-to change the way we build cities in the areas exposed to fire.

In addition to establishing safety building codes from basic fires, Mauritz imagines the agricultural interim warehouses surrounding cities that can protect homes and people from effective infringement.

“There is now increasing awareness that live fuel moisture, and the amount of water in the branches and leaves of green living, is also a really strong control of fire dynamics,” Mauritz said. “This is what we have here in Santa Barbara. We have a relatively thin old old agricultural belt. In places that still exist, national forest fires cannot go into the neighborhoods.”