Yet more worrying news for Canada’s beleaguered forests was published earlier this week, when the findings of a study into tree growth rates in boreal areas cast some serious cause for concern.

Researchers looking into the effects of drought in northern forest regions of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba have discovered that the increasing lack of precipitation in recent decades appears to be having a significant and profound effect.

A team of biologists from the University of Montreal, led by Dr. Changhui Peng, studied tree mortality and found significant increases of almost 5% per year over a 45-year period. Forests in western Canada were suffering significantly more than those in the East. Read More...

Tags: Canada, boreal forests, forest management, fire weather monitoring

Individual, local wildfires tend to stand out in the news: California's deadly 2009 Station Fire, fires in Russia sparked by a 2010 summer heat wave, and blazes raging across Texas since November 2010. But at any given time, thousands more wildfires are burning around the world—some wild and deadly, some intentional and controlled for land clearing.

Now, scientists using data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments on NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites have pieced together a decade-long global tour of the world's fires, from waves of grassland fire sweeping across Africa, "the fire continent," to agricultural fires in Asia and to catastrophic wildfires in the western United States. Since Terra launched in 1999 and Aqua in 2002, the MODIS instruments have mapped more than 40 million actively burning fires around the world. This long-term record, MODIS scientists say, is particularly important for understanding how fires respond to climate change and changing human populations.

Read more: nasa.gov Read More...

Tags: wildfire, NASA, Satellite, Megafire, Extreme environments

This video shows the terrifyingly fast rate of spread of the wildfire north of Bastrop Park, Texas. This video has not been altered in any way—this is real time.

Good thing the FTS QD3 Quick Deploy—some of the 50 which were purchased by NIFC last year and are likely being used in Texas right now—can be completely set up and operational in less than 15 minutes, then taken down and rapidly relocated to where needed.

Tags: wildfire, Texas

Wildfires in the Arctic have been becoming more frequent in recent years. Now new research shows that these fires may be increasing the rate of global warming. Analysis of a burn scar from a large tundra fire reveals that large amounts of carbon were released.

In the late summer and autumn of 2007 the Anaktuvuk River fire, on the north slope of the Brooks Range in Alaska, burned over 1,000 square kilometres of Arctic tundra. This doubled the total burned in this region over the past 50 years. Scientists who estimated the damage from his particular fire found that this fire released around 2.1 teragrams of carbon – equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas emissions from the entire country of Barbados.
Read More...

Tags: Arctic, wildfire

Nature is pummeling the United States this year with extremes.

Unprecedented triple-digit heat and devastating drought leading to massive wildfires. Deadly tornadoes. Massive rivers overflowing. A billion-dollar blizzard. Hurricane-caused flooding. Earthquakes in parts of the country that rarely experience them.

Climate experts point to global warming, meteorologists cite the influence of the La Nina weather phenomenon or natural variability and, in the case of tornadoes hitting populated areas, many simply call the death and destruction bad luck. But given the variety and violence of both short-term weather events and longer-term effects like a Southwestern drought that has lasted years, more scientists say climate itself seems to be shifting and weather extremes will become more common. “A warmer atmosphere has more energy to power storms. We’ve loaded the dice,” says Jeff Masters, co-founder and director of meteorology for Weather Underground, Inc. “Years like 2011 may become the new normal in the United States in coming decades.” Read More...

Tags: Extreme environments

How the frequency and intensity of wildfires and intentional biomass burning will change in a future climate requires closer scientific attention, according to Dr. Melita Keywood of the CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) of Australia. Fire—one of nature's primary carbon-cycling mechanisms—will become an increasingly important driver of atmospheric change as the world warms. "Understanding changes in the occurrence and magnitude of fires will be an important challenge for which there needs to be a clear focus on the tools and methodologies available to scientists to predict fire occurrence in a changing climate." The link between long-term climate change and short-term variability in fire activity is complex, with multiple and potentially unknown feedbacks.
Read More...

Tags: wildfire, fuel loads