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Effects of climate change on wildfire and air quality

We investigated the impact of climate change on wildfire activity and carbonaceous aerosol concentrations in the western United States for the 2000 to 2050 time period. We used observed wildfire activity and meteorology over the period 1980-2004 to develop relationships between weather and wildfire. We found that May-October mean temperature and fuel moisture explain 24-57% of the variance in annual area burned in the West. Increasing temperatures simulated by the NASA/GISS GCM under the IPCC A1B scenario drive a 78% increase in area burned in the Pacific Northwest and a 175 % increase in the Rocky Mountains by mid-century.

The plot above shows the change to surface level summer (June-August) organic carbon aerosol concentrations over the western United States by mid-century, simulated using GEOS-chem driven by meteorological fields from NASA/GISS GCM. Simulated organic carbon aerosol concentrations increase by an average of 40% over the western United States by 2050. We separate the effects of changing climate from changing wildfire and find that 75% of this increase is driven by larger fires in a warmer climate. For more details see Spracklen et al. [2009].