Transcripts of FireAGU2012-720 H



[chime sound] My name is Doug Morton. I work at Goddard Space Flight Center. I use NASA satellites to understand how fires burn across the globe and how those fires release carbon emissions into the atmosphere, contributes to global warming. Climate, and the dryness of the climate conditions, influences fire weather everywhere, whether you're in Australia, or Greece, Southern California, or across the entire North American continent. 2012 was a very dry year That dryness is associated with turning forests and grasslands into a flammable mixture of dead materials. The long history of observations we have from NASA satellites about how and where fires burn across the globe, helps us understand what the climate conditions are when those fires are burning. Those climate conditions are really important as we look toward the future and how fire weather may change under projections of future climate change. Most of the climate models project an increase in the risk of fire activity, based purely on how dry the conditions will be in the future. When we look at this, we see it in two different respects. The first is that we expect more extreme events. Events like 2012 across the western U.S. where you have very dry conditions that persist for several months, are associated with lots of fire activity. If we look for those same kinds of dry events in the future, we see that something that's a once-a-decade event under today's climate, might be three or five years in every decade in the middle and end of the century. When we look at the climate projections, we look to see what the strength of the changes will be under different climate scenarios. Actually the risks of fires and particularly the risks of these extreme events is much lower under an emissions scenario that suggests we're making strides against reducing our global warming greenhouse gas emissions. Instead if we look towards a scenario where we continue to be heavily reliant on fossil fuels we see that by the middle of the century, the frequency of these extreme fire weather events is likely to increase, and the length of the fire season is likely to expand. 

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