Climate change may be worsening wildfires in the West

[NickB79]

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/climate-change-may-be-worsening-wildfires-west-2D11733546

SAN FRANCISCO — Wildfires in the western United States are getting worse, and human-caused climate change may be the main culprit in the hotter, more dangerous infernos, new research suggests.

"We're seeing an increase in fire activity across the western United States, and we're seeing it in many different facets of fire activity," study co-author Philip Dennison, a geographer at the University of Utah, said Tuesday here at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. "Total area burned, number of fires and the size of the largest fires are all increasing."

Though Dennison's study isn't the first to suggest that climate change may be fueling more Western wildfires, past studies often looked at limited data sets, ruled out private or public lands or were limited to smaller regions of the country.

[Zambero]

1. Coupled with a century of aggressive wildfire suppression

Accumulated dead fuel loadings and extended hot, dry summers are changing the face of western forests. Smokey seemed like a good idea at the time, but the underlying blanket policy of quickly extinguishing low intensity lightning fires has reaped unintended consequences.