Climate change leading to larger and longer western fire seasons

Over the past three decades, human-caused climate change has nearly doubled the amount of area burned by western U.S. forest fires, according to a new study from the University of Idaho and Columbia University.

The researchers found that a combination of higher temperatures and lower humidity caused an additional 16,000 square miles of western forest to burn between 1984 and 2015, which is equivalent to an area slightly larger than the size of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined.
"No matter how hard we try, the fires are going to keep getting bigger, and the reason is really clear," said study coauthor Park Williams, a bioclimatologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "Climate is really running the show in terms of what burns. We should be getting ready for bigger fire years than those familiar to previous generations." (via Eurekalert)
"We're no longer waiting for human-caused climate change to leave its fingerprint on wildfire across the western U.S. It's already here," said John Abatzoglou, the study's lead author and an associate professor of geography in UI's College of Science. "Over the last several decades we've seen longer fire seasons, larger fires and more area burned - and those observations led us to ask, ‘Why?' What we found was that human-caused climate change played a resounding role in observed increases in forest fire activity."


http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-blogs/climatechange/climate-change-leading-to-larg/60619969