[MCN] Outlook for fire, outlook for snow

[Lance Olsen]

Nature Ecology and Evolution, February 6, 2017

Human exposure and sensitivity to globally extreme wildfire events
David M. J. S. Bowman, Grant J. Williamson, John T. Abatzoglou, Crystal A. Kolden, Mark A. Cochrane and Alistair M. S. Smith

Abstract

Extreme wildfires have substantial economic, social and environmental impacts, but there is uncertainty whether such events are inevitable features of the Earth’s fire ecology or a legacy of poor management and planning. We identify 478 extreme wild- fire events defined as the daily clusters of fire radiative power from MODIS, within a global 10 × 10 km lattice, between 2002 and 2013, which exceeded the 99.997th percentile of over 23 million cases of the ΣFRP 100 km−2 in the MODIS record. These events are globally distributed across all flammable biomes, and are strongly associated with extreme fire weather conditions. Extreme wildfire events reported as being economically or socially disastrous (n = 144) were concentrated in suburban areas in flammable-forested biomes of the western United States and southeastern Australia, noting potential biases in reporting and the absence of globally comprehensive data of fire disasters. Climate change projections suggest an increase in days conducive to extreme wildfire events by 20 to 50% in these disaster-prone landscapes, with sharper increases in the subtropical Southern Hemisphere and European Mediterranean Basin. 

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“For many terrestrial organisms in the Northern Hemisphere, winter is a period of resource scarcity and energy deficits, survivable only …  beneath the snow. 

"The warmer and more stable conditions within the subnivium are ... important for the overwintering success of plants and animals, yet winter conditions are changing rapidly worldwide. 

"Throughout the Northern Hemisphere, the impacts of climate change are predicted to be most prominent during the winter months, resulting in a shorter snow season and decreased snow depth. These climatic changes will likely modify the defining qualities of the subnivium, resulting in broad-scale shifts in distributions of species that are dependent on these refugia. …. 

"We believe that ecologists and managers are overlooking this widespread, crucial, and vulnerable seasonal refugium, which is rapidly deteriorating due to global climate change” 

Pauli et al 2013. The subnivium: a deteriorating seasonal refugium. Frontiers in Ecology and Environment 

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