Compared to the vast forest and wildland fires experienced in many larger countries, the problems faced in the UK must seem to many like a drop in the ocean. But, with a dense population and highly urban infrastructure, large moorland and forest fires can rapidly encroach on areas where people and industry are put in serious danger.

With unseasonably high spring temperatures hitting Britain’s headlines lately, the number of out-of-control fires has reached alarming levels.

Somewhat surprisingly, it is estimated that the UK experiences almost 80,000 wildfires per year. With a population exceeding 60 million, and a land mass under 95,000 square miles it’s easy to see how wildfires pose such a serious threat to lives and commercial interests.

One of the most dramatic events to occur during the March 2012 heatwave was a large hillside inferno that destroyed hundreds of acres of Scottish moorland. What makes this particular blaze so interesting is that it was actually photographed from space. As temperatures soared at ground level, a NASA satellite tracked the plumes of smoke from the fire from 438 miles above a sweltering Britain. Read More...

Tags: wildfire, NASA satellite, UK Met office

Sparks are flying in Idaho amid fears of an increase in major forest fires to rival the historic ‘Big Burn’ inferno of 1910. Governor Butch Otter is predicting disasters aplenty unless the state take control of the management of federal forests.

Despite the extensive work being done to control Idaho’s valuable timberlands by the timber industry and environmentalists in conjunction with federal government, Otter has voiced that only intensive logging will reduce the fire risk.

Addressing a group of Republican lawmakers earlier this week, the outspoken Governor stated “’We’ve got a devastating fire coming at us…”. Read More...

Tags: Gov. Butch Otter , Idaho Conservation League, federal forests

When most people around the world think of Canada or Alaska, they conjure up images of dramatic snow-filled vistas and expansive boreal forests. But if climate change predictions come true, much of that iconic imagery could change dramatically in the very near future.

Many areas of the vast northern landscape are warming up considerably and fears that we could see a significant increase in the number of wild fires are becoming a frightening reality.

Dr. Mike Flannigan, Natural Resources Canada senior research scientist and professor of renewable resources with the University of Alberta, delivered a presentation recently that will be of great concern to wild fire professionals everywhere.
Read More...

Tags: Dr. Mike Flannigan, wildfire management, American Association for the Advancement of Science

It seems that hardly a week goes by without another major wildfire raging through parts of the American West. Ongoing droughts, changes in land-use, rising temperatures and a whole range of influences are combining to make the situation increasingly worse.

But a new study looking at historical data has fire management professionals rethinking the value of wild fires and their impact on the local environment.

A recently published paper by a 12-strong team of researchers from the University of Oregon concludes that human presence has helped change the fire regime in the western US. Early settlers suppressed wildfires and altered the landscape through the introduction of grazing and other intensive land use changes. Read More...

Tags: wildfire management, fire weather monitoring, University of Oregon, American West

When it comes to finding ways of helping prevent bushfires it sometimes helps to think outside of the box.

But as far as ideas go, the latest one being proposed as a means to reduce increasing fires in Australia’s Northern Territory may seem stranger than most.

David Bowman, an environmental scientist at the University of Tasmania, suggests in a recent article in the journal Nature that the problem could be tempered by the introduction of large, grazing mammals. And by large, he is referring to elephants and rhinoceroses.

On the face of it, Bowman’s recommendations may seem rather peculiar, but there is a sound logic to his pachydermic proposition. Read More...

Tags: Australia, wildfire, elephants

In the wake of devastating wildfires, two opposing forces are creating an unlikely alliance in an effort to safeguard the future of Arizona’s forests.

For many years, loggers and environmentalists have been seen as being diametrically opposed to one other but a determination by both sides to prevent the wholesale destruction of The Grand Canyon State’s vital forests has brought them together. Read More...

Tags: wildfire prediction, wildfire prevention, climate change

Wildfires are an essential part of forest ecology. They occur as part of an essential cycle that encourages growth and regeneration.

In the vast conifer forests of North America these natural fires might happen fairly infrequently—less than once a century or so. But shifts in land use and climate change issues, have seen a marked increase in the occurrence of wildfires in many regions. Read More...

Tags: Yellowstone, NASA, National Parks, forest management

We recently came across this great photoessay by William deBuys, author of A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest. In it he offers some spectacular photography taken last summer during the wildfire near Los Alamos, NM. As he describes it: Read More...

Tags: Arizona, Southwest, Amazing photos

Firefighters in Arizona are bracing themselves for another busy season as climatic conditions promise to make 2012 every bit as challenging at last year.

With warm, dry weather being the main feature of current forecasts experts are predicting another fiery season ahead.

2011 turned out to be the worst year on record for Arizona wildfires, with over a million acres caught up in the inferno. And fears of a repeat in the coming months are a very real prospect. Read More...

Tags: QD3, Portable RAWS, wildfire prediction, climate change

Climate change is real, and it is happening right now: temperatures are rising, glaciers shrinking, and this year summer Arctic sea ice reached a new low. We can expect a 2°C rise in global temperatures—maybe even 4°C. But what exactly is going to happen?

One region we may regard as a barometer for change is the Arctic, because it will warm more than regions at lower latitudes—the planet as a whole may warm up by 4°C, but the Poles could warm up by 12°C. The changes will obviously be more extreme. What will this look like? Research indicates that large portions of the region may dry—and burn. As counterintuitive as it may seem, fires may become an important feature of the Arctic landscape. Read More...

Tags: Arctic, climate change

Large forest regions in Canada are apparently about to experience rapid change. Based on models, scientists can now show that there are threshold values for wildfires just like there are for epidemics. Large areas of Canada are apparently approaching this threshold value and may in future exceed it due to climate change. As a result both the area burnt down annually and the average size of the fires would increase, write the researchers of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) and the University of Michigan in the American Naturalist journal. The strategies for combating wildfires, such as increasing prescribed burning, should therefore be reconsidered.

Wildfire is expected to increase as a result of climate change in Canada with the majority of wildfires occurring in non-fragmented coniferous forests. Recovery from fire usually takes 20 years. If fires or logging occurrs on a frequent basis, this can cause landscape traps in which the ecology becomes permanently changed. Read More...

Tags: wildfire prediction, climate change

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

When lightning struck in the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge on August 4, 2011, it hit land primed for wildfire. A previous fire in 2008 had killed trees and brush, leaving dead fuel in its wake. Grass and brush began to re-grow over the old burn scar, but in 2011, drought dried the plants and soil.

According to Rick Vollick, Regional Fire Planner of the Wallkill River NWR, this is a massive fire, a “hundred year” fire as he calls it. This image, taken by NASA’s Aqua satellite, shows that the fire is producing dense smoke as it burns in the swamp. At the time of this shot, the fire was about 1,200 acres, but as of mid August it was over 4,000 acres. Read More...

Tags: Satellite, Megafire, National Parks

We recently came across an article on the US Forest Service website that does an excellent job of explaining the value of prescribed burning for reducing fuel loads.

Frequent, low-severity fires were the norm in many dry forests across the western United States, prior to Euro-America settlement. These fires kept accumulated fuels such as fallen branches and dead trees to a minimum. They cleared out many younger, smaller trees while older trees in these fire-adapted ecosystems developed thick bark that protected them from the heat of periodic fires.

Read More...

Tags: Portable RAWS, QD3, fuel loads

It’s not just the Southwest that’s having a tough times with wildfires this summer: Wildfires in North Carolina have already burned more than 100,000 acres, which is 76,000 acres more than an average year of just 24,000. Only halfway through the fire season, the state’s $20 million budget has been spent. Read More...

Tags: budgets