The trend of growing intensity and extremity of recent wildfires has triggered new research by scientists at UC Santa Barbara's Bren School of Environmental Science & Management and at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Their question: How is one of our most significant climate patterns -- the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) -- being affected by a warming Earth and how, in turn, is that pattern affecting the likelihood and intensity of future wildfires? Their findings could have implications on land use and on wildfire fighting and prevention strategies at urban/wildland interfaces.
Their study, "ENSO's Changing Influence on Temperature, Precipitation and Wildfire in a Warming Climate," has been published in the American Geophysical Union journal Geophysical Research Letters.
"This paper is really saying that in fire-prone places like California and Australia, we can expect future El Niño and La Niña events to have a bigger impact on fire risk in a given year," said Samantha Stevenson, a faculty member with the Bren School and a co-author on the paper. "That's because the sensitivity of land temperature and precipitation to changes in tropical Pacific Ocean temperature is increasing due to climate change."
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