Detecting the effect of climate change on Canadian forest fires

Gillett, Nathan P.; Weaver, Andrew J.; Zwiers, Francis W.; Flannigan, Mike D.

doi:10.1029/2004gl020876

Cited by 633 publications

(482 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…During the 2004 Alaska fire season, about 2.7 million hectares of forests were consumed by wildland fires. This increase in burned area is consistent with that observed throughout the North American boreal forest region (Gillett et al 2004) and may be related to recent climate warming Turetsky 2006, O'Neal et al 2006). Also, the increase in acreage burned appears to be accompanied by an increase in the number of large boreal forest fires (Levinson 2004).…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 83%

Monitoring a boreal wildfire using multi-temporal Radarsat-1 intensity and coherence images

Rykhus

Lü

2011

Geomatics, Natural Hazards and Risk

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Twenty-five C-band Radarsat-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images acquired from the summer of 2002 to the summer of 2005 are used to map a 2003 boreal wildfire (B346) in the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska under conditions of near-persistent cloud cover. Our analysis is primarily based on the 15 SAR scenes acquired during arctic growing seasons. The Radarsat-1 intensity data are used to map the onset and progression of the fire, and interferometric coherence images are used to qualify burn severity and monitor post-fire recovery. We base our analysis of the fire on three test sites, two from within the fire and one unburned site. The B346 fire increased backscattered intensity values for the two burn study sites by approximately 5-6 dB and substantially reduced coherence from background levels of approximately 0.8 in unburned background forested areas to approximately 0.2 in the burned area. Using ancillary vegetation information from the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) and information on burn severity from Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) data, we conclude that burn site 2 was more severely burned than burn site 1 and that C-band interferometric coherence data are useful for mapping landscape changes due to fire. Differences in burn severity and topography are determined to be the likely reasons for the observed differences in post-fire intensity and coherence trends between burn sites.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 83%

Monitoring a boreal wildfire using multi-temporal Radarsat-1 intensity and coherence images

Rykhus

Lü

2011

Geomatics, Natural Hazards and Risk

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“…If this is indeed the case, a key issue is whether there is further potential for landscape fragmentation to offset climateinduced increases in fire in the future [see, e.g., Kloster et al, 2012] given that over 75% of the land area is considered to already be impacted by human activities [Ellis and Ramankutty, 2008]. The large number of regional studies documenting increases in fires in the last two decades [e.g., Barlow and Peres, 2004;Cary, 2002;Gillett et al, 2004;Groisman et al, 2007;Kajii et al, 2002;Meyn et al, 2007;Le Page et al, 2007;Pausas et al, 2008;Soja et al, 2007;Stocks et al, 2003;Westerling et al, 2006;Williams et al, 2010] suggest that we may already have reached the point at which landscape fragmentation is not an effective means of fire suppression, and indeed these recent increases have been explicitly linked to global warming [Running, 2006;Soja et al, 2007] Indeed, projections of future fire activity by Pechony and Shindell [2010] show an increase in global fire activity with warming that is not offset by human influences on ignitions or land use.…”

Section: Implications Of the Paleo-record Of Firementioning

confidence: 99%

Predictability of biomass burning in response to climate changes

Daniau

2012

Quaternary International

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[1] Climate is an important control on biomass burning, but the sensitivity of fire to changes in temperature and moisture balance has not been quantified. We analyze sedimentary charcoal records to show that the changes in fire regime over the past 21,000 yrs are predictable from changes in regional climates. Analyses of paleo-fire data show that fire increases monotonically with changes in temperature and peaks at intermediate moisture levels, and that temperature is quantitatively the most important driver of changes in biomass burning over the past 21,000 yrs. Given that a similar relationship between climate drivers and fire emerges from analyses of the interannual variability in biomass burning shown by remote-sensing observations of month-by-month burnt area between 1996 and 2008, our results signal a serious cause for concern in the face of continuing global warming. , et al. (2012), Predictability of biomass burning in response to climate changes, Global Biogeochem. Cycles, 26, GB4007,

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“…Zhang et al (2005) found clear detectable anthropogenic forcing effects in nine spatial regions ranging from global scale to country-wide (such as southern Canada and China). Finally, Gillett et al (2004a) demonstrated that anthropogenic greenhouse gases and sulfate aerosols have had a detectable influence on fire-season warming of the Canadian forest region, while Karoly and Wu (2005) detected anthropogenic warming trends over many parts of the globe at scales of 500 km. The purpose of this paper is to quantitatively understand the anthropogenic influence on recent surface temperature changes at regional scales through a detection and attribution study.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate Change detection over different land surface vegetation classes

Dang

Gillett

Weaver

et al. 2006

Intl Journal of Climatology

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Abstract:A global land cover classification data set is used to divide the globe into seven regions to study surface temperature changes over different vegetation/surface classes. Statistically significant warming is found from the year 1900 over all regions (except for the ice sheets over Greenland and Antarctica). Outputs from three coupled climate models (CGCM2, HadCM2 and the Parallel Climate Model (PCM)) are used to examine the detection and attribution of surface temperature trends over the various vegetation classes for the past half century. An anthropogenic warming trend is detected in six of the seven regions. Observed trends are consistent with those simulated in response to greenhouse gas and sulfate aerosol forcing except over tropical forest and water where the models appear to overestimate the warming. The similarity between the resultant scaling factors for each region from the different models underscores the reliability of our detection results.

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Detecting the effect of climate change on Canadian forest fires

Cited by 633 publications

References 28 publications

Monitoring a boreal wildfire using multi-temporal Radarsat-1 intensity and coherence images

Monitoring a boreal wildfire using multi-temporal Radarsat-1 intensity and coherence images

Predictability of biomass burning in response to climate changes

Climate Change detection over different land surface vegetation classes

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