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In general, or specific methods from the study?Originally Posted by Mark Rippetoe
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This quote was pure gold. The content in link appeared to be nonsense with its discussion of "average".
"Don't cross a river if it is four feet deep on average." - Nassim Taleb, meaning the average is less important than the variability away from the average.
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Rip,
If you are interested, the link to the article is here:
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Supplemental material describes how they calculated VPD. I don’t necessarily want to turn this into a climate change argument. Rather, it makes the point that wildfire trends are multifactorial, and reducing the upward trend is not as simple as “all we need is more burning/mastication/thinning.”
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While in the US cold temperatures have hit an all time low you never hear that on the cover of the Rolling Stones. I look at The BOM occasionally, but their daily forecasting is about as accurate as just looking out the window. And of course temperature monitoring in built up areas always look hotter then the actual ambient temps. I was born back in the 1950's and I remember fires, floods, drought and huge dust storms that use to come through the old cooper louvre windows and cover everything in fine dust and this was before we had "climate change". As population growth has pushed more folk into bush land areas the consequences of wildfire is greater as more homes are built in fire zones. We had the coldest start to summer this year in more then 60 years, but you never hear about that.
Here is a poem from 1908. They already knew Australia was a land of extremes way back then and it still is, we just can't manage it.
My Country
The love of field and coppice,
Of green and shaded lanes.
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins,
Strong love of grey-blue distance
Brown streams and soft, dim skies
I know but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of drought and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror –
The wide brown land for me!
A stark white ring-barked forest
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon.
Green tangle of the brushes,
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops
And ferns the warm dark soil.
Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at heart, around us
We see the cattle die –
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady, soaking rain.
Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the Rainbow Gold,
For flood and fire and famine,
She pays us back threefold –
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze.
An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land –
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand –
Though Earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.
Dorothea Mackellar
TMPHBITEU
From the abstract:
The models haven't predicted anything correctly (I applaud their tenacity for injecting "VPD" as a variable). You are left with the fact that more fuel means worse fires, no matter the humidity. More fuel is a function of politics in this case, and you know this as well as we do. If California wants to burn itself down, fine with me. You guys would do well to not emulate California.Since the early 1970s, warm‐season days warmed by approximately 1.4 °C as part of a centennial warming trend, significantly increasing the atmospheric vapor pressure deficit (VPD). These trends are consistent with anthropogenic trends simulated by climate models. The response of summer forest‐fire area to VPD is exponential, meaning that warming has grown increasingly impactful. Robust interannual relationships between VPD and summer forest‐fire area strongly suggest that nearly all of the increase in summer forest‐fire area during 1972–2018 was driven by increased VPD.
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Dunning-Kruger in full effect here.
Your problem is that you didn’t get past the abstract. This paper has a gripload of empirical data that they compare against models.
TMPHBITEU
Your problem is that you took this seriously. If want to believe that fires have never been this bad before, go ahead. But you are operating on an inaccurate assumption about my knowledge base in these matters. Go ahead and believe that too.
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So you dismiss the National Fire Danger Rating System? The metrics associated with dead 1000-hour fuel moisture (part of that rating system) track just as expected with an increase in VPD (see Figure 2a and e).
TMPHBITEU
Not the issue at all. Obviously dry fuels burn better than wet fuels. Duh. Why are the dry/wet, have they ever been this dry/wet before, and why are the fuels there? These are the questions.
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Two of the most destructive CA fires in 2018 (Camp and Carr Fires) started in areas (shrub, woodland, and forest) that had burned and/or had burned/been heavily managed 10 years prior. You could make the case that fuel hazard was reduced significantly. Why then did we have unprecedented rates of spread, including a fire tornado in the Carr Fire, in those fires?
For all I know the trends and data in that paper could be a function of decadal climate oscillations. The paper still documents a strong linkage between atmospheric aridity, fuel moisture, and annual fire patterns.
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